Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Kari to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Kari’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is raising the right issues on underlying market trends as well as purely technical considerations. Kari, the floor is yours… 

I’m happy to present you a case of “Web 2.0 gone wrong” á la the wonderful articles at Worse than Failure (aka the Daily WTF).

The Helsinki City Transport together with other nearby cities have for a while ran a successful journey planner on net, which I use quite often. It’s pretty nice service, even though it looks like the they’ve somehow found UI designers from 1992. But no matter, the usability is there and the information is easy to get. It’s the experience that counts, right?

Anyway, they have come up with new service, that I was even more interested in, journey planner for cycling in the Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa metropolitan zone. This time the UI designers together with Web programmers have really outdone themselves. The site, launched this month in the year 2007, does not work in Safari.

The reason why it doesn’t work in Safari? Take a look at the source of the front page and the reason will become painfully clear. Do you recognize the Ajax framework they’ve used? Yes, instead of using established, cross-platform Ajax frameworks which are freely available on the net (some which I mentioned briefly here ), these guys have opted for rolling their own. People familiar with web technologies probably vomited a bit in their mouth while browsing the source. Surely there is a reason to embed all that JavaScript and CSS in the HTML document. Sorry, did I say HTML? The site is for some reason that completely escapes me authored as XHTML Strict (Okay, I’m nitpicking, but guess does it validate?). There are so many things wrong in trying to publish something on the internet as XHTML Strict and serving it as text/html that it warrants it’s own article.

What is worse, if you browse to the site with Safari, you don’t get any indication that something is wrong (other than that the page is rather blank). You have to go Instructions to find that this shiny new thing uses “Ajax technology”.

As a side note, the site doesn’t work with mobiles either. I consider that the probability that any update to any “recent” browser (as they say on their website) will result in breaking this site is pretty high. Remember, if they got it to run on Safari, it would automatically mean that it would run on the newest Nokia handsets, which feature WebKit-based web browser.

One of the reasons why I’m not impressed with this service like I was with the original journey planner back when it was launched is Google Maps. Take a moment to compare the imagery of Helsinki metropolitan area in the cycling planner and in Google Maps. Both images are at both services’ maximum resolution. See how the building construction of the largest construction project in the city center for years hasn’t even started in the upper right image. This is another nice feature of cycling planner, the satellite maps YTV uses are from 2002. According to them, “unfortunately there is no newer [satellite imagery] available”. Suffice to say, between 2002 and 2007, there have been “some” changes in Helsinki city landscape. Somehow Google Maps is able to offer more recent, more detailed, high-resolution imagery than the cities themselves are able to. There is no excuse for this.

I can’t for the life of me understand why did these guys decide that’s it’s perfectly okay to reinvent an inferior wheel in 2007. Seriously, where have these guys been for the past ten years? This site is one of the worst examples of what makes internet hurt these days. It’s like someone wrote the best practices of web applications and these guys made sure to break each and every one of them.

The Helsinki City Transport and YTV should be congratulated for their efforts, as the initiatives are quite nice. It’s the realization that has totally sucked and this crap shouldn’t come as a surprise after all the recent failures (the new trams they bought don’t work in their environment, the usability of the near-contact travel pass is close to zero and the whole system is full of mistakes, I probably won’t see extensions to our metro system even though I wasn’t even born when they started the planning). Of course I’d like to point out that this isn’t just Helsinki City Transport, but I see this tendency elsewhere too. I don’t even dare to mention the swamp that is the Finnish Digital TV. It looks like public sector and state-run organizations have fallen of the track regards to technology.

If you take a look at the footer, you can see all the governmental and EU organizations that have supported this project. What I’m really worried about is that they’re going to “upgrade” the other route planner with this revolutionizing UI. There’s no indication on the website that they are working on making the planner compatible with the internet of 2007. The web app they now is flawed and I don’t see that they can make it work (be compatible) without a major rewrite, something they are not most likely going to do.

I’m not even going to start how what they’re trying to accomplish could be done by combining their route information with Google Maps. That probably would just fry the brains of the cavemen they found and unfroze to use as their web development team.

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