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Hooray for Joe Hockey giving us something to giggle about on an otherwise slow few campaigning days. “Our fear campaign is based on fact”, he told reporters.

Good on ya Joe!

It is fashionable to knock facebook (or facebollox as it is known in these parts) as the last big thing. Just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it wrong. Now that a tiny fraction of its equity is in the hands of Microsoft does it go the way of Hotmail (I can’t believe how many people still use that rubbish) as something one ought to be publicly embarrassed about using?

I was nearly going to let this go but the threat of up to five years in jail for not telling some cloth-head one’s password is almost amusing. In the UK it is now required that encryption keys be divulged to ‘the authorities’ upon request. Telling anyone that such a request has been made is also an offence.

I had a bit of a whinge to some colleagues about EU human rights and the notional right to privacy, not to mention article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However the real point is that once again a useless piece of legislation has come about because of a serious misunderstanding of technology. Once again, ‘those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear’ will be rolled out and once again they will be wrong because those with something to hide will be able to do so and the stupid and inept will be rolled up.

Being on the other side of the globe in the sunny antipodes (currently being rained on) does this matter? Of course it matters because whatever what the result of the forthcoming election the government will have no technical nous and will want to do the same thing. Be alert and alarmed.

And no I will not divulge my encryption keys; though I may just make them stronger and use them more. I also encourage all of you back in the UK to dust off your GPG keys, harden them and start encrypting everything just to annoy.

Oh, and before there is mention of terrorists please be aware that refusing to decrypt your stuff can lead you to spending 2 years in the slammer even if it is just the stock of bit-torrented porn you don’t want your mum to know about.

Well a federal election campaign is happening and once again we see a leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) deciding that the current PM has all the best ideas and is playing ‘me too - but not as much’. Now I am not a political pundit by any means but didn’t FatBoy Kim and the crazy one both lose previous elections by being weak-tea johns?

The response to the Liberal (that is the conservative or right of centre party for those in parts of the world who know what liberal means) bribe was predictable and stupid. What really got up my nose though was Mr Rudd’s position on the death penalty and the imminent execution of the Bali Bombers.

The ALP has a principalled and solid position: it is against the death penalty. End of. So why does their leader go around making exceptions (apart from the fact that it works with the Murdoch press)? Shame Kev, shame!

Just for that you deserve to lose. Though that would mean another 3 years of Howard and that would be worse.

Don’t forget (if you are able to vote in the Australian election) - vote below the line in the Senate.

Maybe we do get the politicians we deserve after all. Lazy, unprincipalled, conniving, greedy and not terribly bright, just like the rest of the population.

Another little known fact (I seem to be full of them of late) is that the Australian constitutional model is not based on the Westminster system, although some claim it is. However, there are still a few conventions which were upheld until the last decade or so.

The last of these to go by the board is the separation of powers. Indeed constitutionally this is far more obvious in Australia than in the UK [Attorney General]. However, it appears that current politicians have been to the Bjelke-Petersen school of political science. It seems that the executive now feel that they should overrule the judiciary whenever they disagree, even when those involved may be “more innocent than innocent”.

So I have asked Mr Andrews to explain to me the concept of the rule of law and the doctrine of the separation of powers; as I appear to be confused. I will keep you updated.

When was the last time you put out a product brochure or press release without thinking about what it said?

When you create a prospectus or sales brochure you get the copy written by a professional - either in-house or a contracted copywriter. Do you put that amount of care into the copy on your web site? If so, well done you can ignore the rest.

Your web site may be the first contact a potential business partner or customer has with you. It should get far more readers than your paper material. So you should put at least as much resource into getting the copy right.

Web copy is different from print copy. It works differently. People interact with it differently. It needs to behave in many ways unique to this medium; not many brochures get syndicated and refactored for delivery on other brochures in real time without you knowing it do they?

Your copy must stand alone. It carries your message. It sells your property, fills your leases and shifts your units. If it doesn’t do the job sitting typed on a side of A4 it won’t do it on your web site - no matter how cool your designer thinks s/he is.

Make sure the copy for your site does what you need it to do, wherever you get it. Only then think about enhancing the message with design. Once that is done you have the core of a web site, so start improving conversion through experimentation and structure. Once all of that is done you can think about web toys. By then you may not want them.

It is a little known fact that I wrote one of the earliest JavaScript WYSIWYG editors for IE4. It sucked. But it was better than anything else available at the time. It even did tables and forms (wow, I hear you ironise, but this is going back 6 or 7 years).

The little embedded WYSIWYG editor tries to make the transition from nasty word processors to nasty web pages easy for people. They fail pretty much without exception. Part of the problem is that browser implementation sucks; part is that website and CMS developers suck (yep, that’s me); and part is that content producers are lazy hacks.

The main issue though is that online what you see is never what you get. And nor should it be. Even if all browsers rendered HTML and CSS according to a properly written and unambiguous specification we would still have variation in appearance. Screen resolution, default fonts, viewport size, other types of user agents, user style sheets, the list is endless.

What can we do? Well first of all, live with it. Variation is not just inevitable it is a good thing. Make content clear and free of formatting so it can be refactored and rendered by all sorts of user agents. Get CSS to do its job. Use something like Markdown or Textile instead of a WYSIWYG editor and live with the limitations.

What can content producers do? Write well using language for emphasis, source appropriate media and structure your content for maximum impact. This makes the silly formatting tricks which are the province of the WYSIWYG editor unnecessary. Plan your content and introduce some consistency; this helps usability as well as making the publishing process easier. Finally, learn just a little bit of whatever flavour of (X)HTML your site uses. The content producers at AIA use a small subset of XHTML 1.0 and hand code almost everything. They are writers not web developers. They know enough to get the job done, rather than enough to be dangerous.

A list apart is undertaking a survey of web workers; not just designers depite the title. Take the survey if you are involved in web work. We need to know who we are!

Not really apropos anything.

I took a trip on Friday and Saturday to go in search of some of the large flat bit of Australia. Friday saw me in Parkes on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range (not really great and doesn’t actually divide either). I finally found some flat stuff between Condolbolin and Lake Cargelligo. I had intended to go further west but had to cut my trip short.