Day: December 3, 2005

Candidates

CBC’s list of ridings and candidates is already behind, at least for my riding and one of those adjacent. One is somewhat understandable—UWO student Stephen Maynard just won the NDP nomination on Wednesday—but Liberal nominee Glen Pearson was acclaimed almost a full week ago, and was pretty much a given for a week previous to that.

But that’s nothing compared to the other national news media sites. I can’t even find election coverage on CanWest Global’s canada.com site (which features the purported National Post), The Globe and Mail has an election section but doesn’t have a list of candidates, and CTV’s election mini-site doesn’t appear to have a list either. (None of the sites’ search engines turn up hits for Maynard or Pearson either.) The local paper fares better, as one might hope: it had Pearson in its map of regional nominees, published the day after the writ dropped, and had a brief mention of Maynard’s nomination on Wednesday.

Just do it

A simple plea: If your site depends on having Macromedia Flash installed, just include the code to use it, and don’t bother trying to detect whether a browser has the plugin installed or not. People that have it will see your page as you intend; people that don’t will be prompted to download it by the browser.

Tonight’s rant is sponsored by the so-called moock flash detector and the browser makers who invented navigator.plugins.

What’s this all about?

Noticed in the footer of CBC’s Vote by Issue Quiz:

Produced by: CBC.ca in Canada

To submit feedback to CBC.ca, visit cbc.ca/contact.

To report bugs or leave feedback, email webmaster@wbur.bu.edu

Curiosities include:

  • The oddly-phrased CBC.ca in Canada. It makes a little more sense if you realize that…
  • The quiz is on a non-CBC website, the American votebyissue.org run by Boston University. I’m guessing that the content was created by CBC employees but the issue-matching webapp is from BU.
  • The text of the contact link points to a different URL (cbc.ca/contact) than the link itself (the CBC.ca homepage).

The forms in the webapp are strange too: they use checkboxes (suggesting multiple selection) with Javascript to allow only one selection instead of radio buttons (which are designed to work that way). The only reason I can see for this, and it’s suggested by the instructions but not overtly, is that you can choose not to answer a particular question; if you’ve already made a choice you can uncheck a box entirely. A more intuitive/natural interface, I think, would be to use radio buttons with a third item for “no selection”.

To give credit where it’s due, it is nice to see that all of the items in the quiz forms are marked up with <label> elements. On the downside, though, navigation between the post-quiz issues pages is done using radio buttons instead of simple links, even though getting to the pages in the first place does use links. Why‽

Finally, I also noticed that the page titles for the “issues” pages all say WBUR :: Yahoo UK & Ireland :: Vote By Issue Quiz. Where did that come from?

And no, I’m not going to publish my results.