The BBC News website got a redesign this week. Naturally, lots of people hate it, but that’s because people hate change. I’m largely on the other side of the fence, and, objectively, the BBC’s mostly done a good job: the site content has room to breathe, the space-wasting left-hand nav strip has been ditched, there are no rounded corners, and although the amount of home-page content hasn’t been reduced, the design feels less cluttered. (That said, as Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, White space is like the comma: you have to put it in the right places, not just sprinkle around.)

However, I do wonder how much testing the BBC did across platforms. On my Macs, article body text is significantly less legible than it was previously. Delving into the style sheet, it seems the corporation’s centred on Helvetica Neue in grey for most of its text (falling back to Arial for anyone who doesn’t have this installed—in other words, anyone but Mac users). This is baffling, since Helvetica Neue is designed for print design, not the screen; and while Panic sometimes uses the font on its website, it’s doing so for what’s effectively a read-once advert, not many thousands of news articles. (Crucially, Panic also has the text in black, not a mid-grey, thereby hugely increasing readability.)

The BBC News redesign is therefore a great example of single-point of failure in web design. It looks great, the layout works, and even the headings look good. It only falls down when you start trying to read an article—but unfortunately for the BBC, that’s the main point of a news site’s existence.

So I just went to Google’s home page, to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s what I saw:

After checking my surroundings to make sure that I hadn’t abruptly time-travelled to 1996, my web designer side kicked in and wondered what possessed Google to utterly destroy the basic fundamental usability of its search engine’s home page.

One of the core benefits of Google’s search engine has always been its simplicity. It gained marketshare by avoiding all the crud rivals added to ‘expand’ the search experience for users. With Google, you got a plain white page with a search box—simple and efficient.

Having used other Google products, I always had the nagging doubt that the Google home page aesthetic was more down to the company’s lack of design skills than anything else, and this new update pretty much confirms that. The current page has a background that makes it extremely difficult to read any of the on-screen text. It’s the kind of abomination that would have gotten a junior web designer fired from any self-respecting agency in 1996, let alone in 2010.

In an added nail to the coffin, the ‘change background image’ link that you can just about make out at the bottom-left of the page (that is if your eyes haven’t already exploded) doesn’t actually enable you to remove the background. Instead, you have to sign in to your Google account, assuming you have one. From a user-experience standpoint, this is crazy, but maybe Google just doesn’t care—after all, there are no ads on its home page.

Lukas Mathis has written a great piece on Safari Reader. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s new in Safari 5. Using a keyboard shortcut, a panel slides up, containing the content of the article you’re reading, stripping everything else. In many cases, it also manages to stitch together multi-page articles automatically. The typography in Safari Reader is suspect, but the idea itself is what’s caught the attention of many people, who are proclaiming it to be the Worst Thing Ever (Ars Technica seems particularly miffed).

The reason for the anger is because Reader strips the ads, the branding, and everything apart from the content. As Mathis notes, though: “If your users are using a third-party product to make your product usable, you are doing something wrong.” That is a sentence that every single content provider on the web should read several times, digest, and, if necessary, write in permanent marker on both hands.

Something like Safari Reader shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and that’s because the majority of content providers now offer such a poor reading experience online, burying content in amongst dozens of ads, or splitting up small articles across dozens of pages, in order to maximise ad impressions. This is a hateful, cynical, user-hostile approach, and it’s precisely because of this that the likes of Reader and the wonderful Instapaper exist.

In my life as a web designer, I’ve watched in horror as companies have forced clean, efficient designs to mutate into nasty ad-infested, unreadable disasters. The questions “Can’t we get at least one more ad above the fold?” and “Can we make the text smaller, so we can fit more on the screen?” still fill me with horror. And I’m constantly baffled by online publications that see fit to split a 20-item gallery of tiny images over 20 slow-to-load pages.

I’m not saying ads are inherently bad, nor that they should be removed from every website. Just don’t make them the focus. And in some cases, splitting articles in a sensible manner can actually aid usability, even taking into account the ‘infinite’ height of web pages. Just make sure that if you’re involved in any aspect of creating a website that you don’t make the user’s experience so bad that they feel compelled to use third-party technology in order to easily read your site’s articles.

I’ve spent quite a lot of my life over the past couple of months writing about the Adobe-Apple spat. Frankly, I’m sick of the thing and wish the two companies would either get a room or have a punch-up in the car-park, before lolling around drunk and going “I’m, like, really sorry. You know you’re my best mate?”

Today, the row took a turn for the bizarre, with Adobe posting an open letter from founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock. In it, they argue for open markets (which is fine), against closed systems (also fine), and rattle on about how in open markets, the best products win in the end (again, fine).

Where the entire thing gets smacked in the face in surprised fashion, like a foot suddenly flipping an infinite number of rakes towards the foot’s owner’s head, is when Flash enters the equation. Adobe again argues that Flash is an ‘open’ technology, and that in ‘banning’ it from its devices Apple has “taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web—the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time”.

This is total and utter bullshit and makes me extremely angry. First, Flash is proprietary technology. Adobe can bleat all its wants about publishing specifications, but the fact remains Flash is Adobe’s toy. It’s pissed off with Apple because Apple is saying Adobe’s toy isn’t good enough, and people listen to what Apple says, not least when it’s related to the newest and shiniest Apple product.

Secondly, Apple is hardly going to “undermine” the next chapter of the web when it’s a supporter of truly open web standards, such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, which are supported well by Apple’s various versions of Safari. Safari, remember, is available on all of Apple’s mobile devices.

Throughout this spat, I’ve felt sympathy for developers. It sucks that they can no longer package an app in Flash and send it to the App Store (even though such apps are effectively Flash apps and not ‘proper’ iPhone apps). I also think it’s a shame for the publishing industry that Apple’s entirely banned Flash from its platform, because many of the most interesting publishing innovations of late use Flash. However, to argue that Apple is undermining the next chapter of the web due to its stance is absolute hogwash, and I certainly expected better of Geschke and Warnock.

Update: John Nack of Adobe posts on his blog, strongly refuting the claim.

Since Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, showing quite blatantly that it didn’t support Flash, the backlash has been severe. Lots of (frankly stupid) journos have blathered on about how no Flash spells doom for Apple’s device, forgetting that people don’t care about technology—they just care about what you can do with it. In other words, Flash isn’t important, but the things you can do with it are. Flash is mostly used for games, ads, video and overblown interactive websites. Right now, popular Flash-originated games already exist on the App Store (often for free), everyone hates ads, video services are transitioning to open standards and overblown interfaces can go die in a fire.

But despite what some claim, Apple’s rather brutal stance as far as the web goes isn’t to block competition, but to push open standards, rather than proprietary ones. People forget that Flash isn’t open—it’s just very popular. Somehow, even many geeks are OK with this, despite the fact they rallied against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for being in much the same position fairly recently.

Perhaps the difference in reaction to Microsoft and Adobe was down to the former’s appalling business practices, using its ‘unfair’ advantage to bully the competition into submission. Sadly, it appears Adobe’s now overstepped this mark. Various sources reported yesterday that Adobe has blocked the latest publication of HTML5 (AppleInsider), the standard that could knock Flash down a peg or 20.

This revelation comes off the back of months of regular comments from Adobe about the importance of supporting open standards. Nonetheless, if there’s any truth to the linked article (and similar ones doing the rounds) it appears Adobe’s narked about the ‘canvas’ element in HTML5, which is a direct threat to Flash. What Adobe should do is start work on some amazing authoring tools to create content for HTML5, rather than trying to slow its ascent and keep Flash in the spotlight for longer. As Microsoft will tell you, a company can only hold back the tide for so long, and the tech community holds grudges for many years.