[Ads-l] A quick review of the new OED.com

[Daphne Preston-Kendal]

On 23 Jul 2023, at 19:26, dave at wilton.net <dave at WILTON.NET> wrote:

> You can also turn off the tabbed view if you're on a PC to get the entire entry on one page.

The requirement to have a *personal* account set up on the site to make this switch permanent irks my acquired German reflex for privacy. I never felt the need to set up a personal account on the old OED site, and it just worked perfectly when connected through my university VPN. Now the VPN doesn’t work to let me into the site. I found I can use the ‘institutional login’ button, but then if I want to get access *and* have it remember that I want to read in non-tabbed view, I have to log in twice every time I visit the site: once with my uni to give me access, and once into my personal account so it will remember this setting.

The decision to put the etymology below all the definitions when in the non-tabbed view was also, I think, a bad one. Often the etymology provides useful context to understand the definition text. I looked at the entry for ‘twofer’ and, since I didn’t know the word, it wasn’t immediately obvious from the first sense why it was the name of a type of cigar (even though the words ‘two for …’ appear in the definition text). As you say, of course, the information is still there – I just have to scroll down, or click the etymology tab – but I think the presentation is much worse, and that I will more often miss important information by oversight because the website hides it in so many places.

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dpk (Daphne Preston-Kendal) ·· 12103 Berlin, Germany ·· http://dpk.io/
  <nsh> the real turing test should be to successfully emulate the
     exact kinds of unintelligence that only humans are capable of

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