SCMP redesign

Hong Kong's newspaper of record, the South China Morning Post has redesigned their website. The new design is appalling: Far less of the news seems to be available, and what's there is harder to navigate.

Plus, what's with the stupid breaking of articles? I could understand splitting a long article up to get more ad impressions, but the page loads the whole thing and just uses some silly javascript tricks to display it. What's the point? Some articles have an almost blank second section, and some have an almost blank first section.

Why lose the prev/next story navigation links? It's not possible now to go through the stories one at a time.

And they've increased the size of the pages by including tons of javascript rubbish instead of linking common files. And why have all the CSS and then do a table based layout?

Links to articles which looked like this:

http://focus.scmp.com/focusnews/ZZZU7XO0CZE.html

now look like this:

http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d 7733492d9253a0a0a0/?vgnextoid=9088cb6d22373110VgnVCM 100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=Insight&s=Opinion

(Note that I've wrapped that to avoid breaking my layout.)

Don't even get me started on the RSS stupidity, where I'm supposed to copy a url to an external reader to get a small sample of the stories available.

It's a significant downgrade in both the amount and quality of information available. And yet we're expected to pay the same amount. If only we had actual consumer protection laws in HK...