Whilst looking up Coldplay’s website, came across the Top 40 chart on the BBC site.

All very good looking.

Then I noticed the Text only link so I clicked it. The BBC website is regularly cited as an example of a good website. Mainly because it’s the most popular website in Europe, so it must be doing something right. What the hell is with the text only version ?!?!? I mean, come on! surely the BBC with all that license money could come up with something that looks a little bit better for a top 40 list for text-only viewers ?

Further investigation shows that the BBC uses a tool called Betsie to generate it’s text only pages. Now Betsie is really clever and you can change the default text font/colours that it displays. I’m very impressed. The source is also available.

The only question then becomes “why did they choose those colours and sizes by default ?!?!?!?” On an 800×600 screen you can’t see much content!