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by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 870 days ago
I think it's a reasonable way to present it as evidence of what had been available from someone else's server rather than just words that are presented by their own server. From an accessibility perspective, it would be nice if they could ensure that a screen reader will start reading the text when it encounters the image but it otherwise seems to be a good reporting practice.
1 comments
dylan604 870 days ago
If it was a scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage, then maybe we can say it's an acceptable format. But having some designer do a layout and then save it as a rasterized image so that it scales beyond original size so that it lowers the legibility of the text, then no, it is not a reasonable method.
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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 870 days ago
> scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage

I see, download the HTML as provided by the server at the time. Then provide that separately and include the relevant text in the article. Yeah, that would be a better method.

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dylan604 870 days ago
We've had full page documents as PDFs for a long long time now. This isn't new. It's just someone wanting to be fancy/trendy/whatevs without consideration that people use the web in ways other than the designers do.
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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 870 days ago
I’m thinking about it similar to how American law enforcement is required to store digital evidence, in particular the requirement that it’s “unmodified”. Per my understanding, that would disqualify, e.g., a .jpg that was converted to a .png from being submitted as evidence.

Obviously a journalist isn’t law enforcement but a good one will still gather and retain evidence. They also don’t necessarily need to be as strict as prosecutors but it’s a good standard to try to emulate. To that end, a PDF wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t doubt that these assumptions are overly generous to the reality of their evidence-gathering; it’s a bit idealistic and the implementation is lacking, at best. But if that’s their point behind the screenshot instead of inline text, I still think they’re coming from the right place. They mostly just have a bad implementation.

But at the same time, I get where you’re coming from, even assuming more responsible intentions. A bit more applied critical thinking in such a context likely results in a better implementation. That is largely why the above assumptions seem so generous.

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