CSS Crimes in the Public Sector

After I worked at the BBC for a bit

Some years ago now I worked on the BBC Developer Portal — alas, the plans to open it up to the public so you could all use (some of) the BBC’s APIs never really came to fruition (yet?), but the landing page is still visible to the public. Have a look! If you’ve had a look, have another look, and this time click the laptop screen in the stock photo.

This came about because we’d found this stock photo that we mostly liked, but the code on the screen was distractingly clear and bright and colourful, so I was asked to replace it with something a little more subdued.

Someone editing garishly brightly coloured on a Macbook computer. The depth of field is very low so most of the image is quite blurry, except the code. There's a tablet and some other miscellaneous tech-looking nonsense on the desk nearby.

So I deleted the original code, but it happened that I’d recently found a tool to create CSS transform matrices, so rather than use whatever photo-editing software I had to hand, I made the new content in HTML and CSS. So, well, it didn’t really make sense to flatten it back into a Jpeg. So instead, the code on the screen is actually a separate element in the HTML.

That element is an editable textbox. You can copy-paste the code out to see what it is. There are a dozen or so different ‘code’ snippets that cycle at random, including some bits from BBC open-source projects, and a few silly in-jokes. You can edit, scroll and select the code live on the screen.

Also, the textbox is excluded from the tab index and hidden from screen-readers so that this silliness doesn’t impact anyone negatively.