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Neutral Zone

Your host and principal coding monkey

Ordinarily I don’t use this newsletter to talk politics, but the future of the Internet—a key tool for Constellation Design and for most of its clients—has recently become an issue in the U.S. Congress.

Lawmakers recently debated commerce legislation that would restrict Internet service providers from engaging in practices such as blocking access to one search engine in favor of another or charging site operators extra money for the privilege of not having their sites load slowly on personal computers. These protections against a discriminatory Internet have been labeled “Net Neutrality,” and thus far business on the Internet has operated under such a concept. But legislative changes have begun to remove Internet service from “common carrier” legal protections, opening the door for a potential sea change in favor of the corporate interests. The House (in full) and the Senate (in committee) both defeated Net Neutrality amendments in June, under pressure from broadband lobbyists that want to institute a “tiered Internet” and charge Website operators for “premium” service while relegating those who won’t or can’t pay to a cyber-ghetto where access and downloads are painfully slow—or blocked altogether, if the ISP so chooses.

Constellation Design and its clients are primarily small businesses that would suffer if Net Neutrality is not maintained. Keeping the playing field level so that Web surfers can punch up small-scale e-commerce and blog sites as easily as they can the largest mega-sites is in the best interest of every small business and individual who wants a presence on the Internet.

One frustrating element to this is that some of the legislators involved do not understand Net Neutrality or even the Internet itself. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and in his remarks opposing Net Neutrality he demonstrated remarkable ignorance of the Internet, describing it as “a series of tubes” (it’s not) and referring to average home users’ “personal Internets” (there is only one Internet). Stevens and others seem to be uninterested in educating themselves about how the Internet works and have perhaps been duped by misleading propaganda being proffered by broadband lobbyists such as the ironically-named “Hands Off the Internet” group.

We at Constellation encourage you to read up on Net Neutrality and let your Senators and Representatives know how you feel about it—and if necessary, give them a little tutelage. A few good places to start are savetheinternet.com, Scientific American magazine, and Google.

Ballpark Sitings

I was in San Francisco for a few days last April, and as fate would have it, my last day in town happened to be Opening Day for the San Francisco Giants. The game was long sold out, but one never knows what kind of corporate give-backs or other tickets might become available at the last minute, so I logged on to the Giants’ Website and was able to snag a single seat for the opener. The game was fun, but what’s relevant here is that the Giants’ site has a quite splendid section devoted to their home field, AT&T Park.

The site makes nice use of Flash on the home page with a small slide-show of the stadium, but it’s the rest of the pages that give the site its real class, with clean layouts, unintrusive background graphics, and excellent use of the ballpark’s earth-tone color scheme. It succeeds at being a functional, clean, and elegant promotion for a high-end event venue while maintaining the look and feel of an old-time baseball park.

It’s not perfect; I spotted a number of glaring code flaws and browser-compatibility glitches in just a cursory tour. But when even a detail-obsessed, uptight coder like me can overlook the mistakes in a high-profile project like this, you know someone’s done something right.

While on the subject of ballparks, baseball fans might appreciate a glance at http://ballparks.com. Ballparks is an unassuming Website without much in the way of glitz and frills, but sporting a treasure-trove of information and minutiae about the cathedrals of the church of baseball. Past, present, and planned-for future stadia are all accounted for, complete with photographs, field dimensions, construction data, historical facts, and game trivia. There’s even a section on Sicks’ Seattle Stadium, longtime minor-league park and home of Major League ball for a mere single season (the 1969 home of the ill-fated Seattle Pilots), which I learned from the site once burned to the ground after a July 4th fireworks show in 1932.

Another ballpark info and trivia site isn’t so hot: http://baseball-statistics.com has a parks section that fails some basic Website construction tests. In addition to being generally dull in appearance, the pages devoted to older ballparks like the Polo Grounds (home of the New York Giants until 1957) are rife with broken links, missing images, and code errors that play havoc with browser compatibility. The information it gives is decent, but on a purely visual and professional level, it strikes out against ballparks.com.