When this happened to me, I turned to Mark Collis, EAOA's webmaster, and Dave Wotton, who manages the WAOC web site, for clarification. This timely article by Dave is the result (ed.)
Most Orienteering clubs now publish their event results on the Internet, a move which I'm keen to promote, but perversely, it seems to me that results are getting harder to access this way. This article is a plea to club web masters to think a little bit about how they design their results for the web to make them more accessible to their users.
First of all, there's the decision whether to display the results as a single web-page, or as multiple web pages, one per course. There is a tendency, especially with badge events, to display the results with each course or class on a separate page. I would strongly urge web-masters to display the results on a single page: most of us want to see the results of our families, friends, club-mates and rivals, as well as our own results. If results are spread over 10 or more pages, a lot of time can be wasted hopping from page to page. Did Joe Bloggs run M35L? no, not there. Perhaps he ran M35S? No, not there either. Perhaps he ran up? Now, what about Jane Smith? ...
If you're viewing the results from home, it can take a long time to download all the relevant pages. And spare a thought for the club captain, who wants to see the results of everyone in the club.
For large events, it's probably a good idea to create shortcut links within the page, so that from the top of the page you can quickly navigate to a particular course within the page. These shortcuts could also be repeated at other points within the page (although this is less important, it's easy enough to press the Back key to return to the list of shortcuts at the top of the page).
Another increasing problem is related to the actual production of results (this will get a bit technical, sorry about that), and is perhaps related to the previous issue. This is the problem of the web-page size (in kilobytes) and the amount of time it takes to download. Web-pages are written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which consists of the text you see plus lots of hidden "markup tags", to do things like switch bold and italics on and off, enlarge headers, set font sizes and typefaces etc.
In the early days of the web, most web pages were "hand-crafted" with the web-master inserting the appropriate markup tags manually into a standard text file of results. This created an overhead of approximately 10%. A typical set of colour-coded results would be 30 Kb and take 1 or 2 seconds to display using a 56K modem. However, nowadays many people are using Microsoft Word to produce the results and using its ability to save the results as HTML. Unfortunately, MS Word does this very inefficiently and creates web-pages with masses of unnecessary markup tags. For example, the recent CSC match results produced by LEI were 218Kb in size. Depending on the time of the day, and the speed of your modem, this can take 20 seconds or more to download. As an experiment, I removed the unnecessary tags and reduced the page size to 55 Kb, with negligible visible difference to the displayed page, so the overhead is 75% (ie. 3/4 of the file serves no useful purpose). (If you want to see the markup tags to which Dave refers, when you have the web-page loaded, from the View menu choose Source or Page Source and all will be revealed ed.)
This is just one example, there are many more. Sometimes you can wait minutes for a results page to download. Quite simply, I haven't got the patience to wait for huge pages like this to download, so I don't view these results on the web. There's no point in producing results electronically if you create files so big that people are discouraged from viewing them.
It's unlikely that web-masters will abandon tools like Microsoft Word and learn the skills of writing HTML manually, so I'm writing a program which will take a web-page generated by MS Word and remove all the superfluous markup tags, reducing web page file sizes by 80%, so that they take up less disc space and display a lot faster. I'll make this program freely available when I've completed it. (It'll also work with the BOF fixtures list, which is also generated using Word, and can take a long time to download).
Once you've created your results, make them easy to find: create a link from the BOF results web-page (it's easy to do, and you can do it yourself) and from your club's own home page. If the results have been updated, indicate somehow that they have been.
Finally, one last plea: although provisional results are often posted on the web within just one or two days (great!), can web-masters please, please, please then later update the web-site results to include the officials' comments, course par times and any other annotation, so that the results on the web contain the same content as those sent through the post? I'd dearly love to stop having paper results sent to me, but quite often fill in a results envelope because I can't be certain that the website results will be complete. Clubs will only benefit from reduced postage and printing costs when this happens.
Dave Wotton (WAOC)