Month: March 2006

Tire fire

Rene Roy from Canada writes: What do you think about the Canadian Tire Guy being dumped?

Leah: I just heard about that. It’s kind of sad.

I’m glad Rene Roy asked this important question during last week’s Globe and Mail chat with Leah McLaren, what with boring topics like Crash-lash and intra- and extra-office romance getting all the press. 🙂 But I have to weigh in, and now’s as good a time as any: nothing against Ted Simonett or Gloria Slade, but their Canadian Tire couple ads were nothing but a ripoff of Home Hardware’s long-running earlier campaign featuring Keith Kemps and Kaya McGregor.

Kaya and Keith were superior in every way: they had realistic relationships and conversations between themselves and their neighbours, they weren’t obnoxiously condescending, and they each had (sometimes unexpected) strengths and weaknesses. (Among other things, I love the fact that she was the handy one.) I bought their characters and characterizations so much that I wrote to Stuart McLean at one point suggesting that, should his Vinyl Cafe stories ever be filmed, Keith and Kaya would be shoo-ins to play Dave and Morley.

So, with all due respect to Leah McLaren, good riddance to the CTC. May they be cursed with spending eternity with Canadian Tire’s equally- and always-obnoxious Scrooge and Santa.

Web standards

I find it somewhat ironic that both the Web Standards Project and advocate Lachlan Hunt updated their sites recently but failed to meet one of the goals of the web: that Cool URIs Don’t Change. Even if they did find that the URIs had to change, there are ways to prevent the existing ones from disappearing—but that’s exactly what happened to their feed links.

On a related topic, both sites also failed to preserve their unique item IDs in the new feeds.

Both are subtle points that affect what’s most probably a tiny minority of users… but is it setting a good example that they don’t/can’t/won’t take these implicit standards into account?

I don’t claim to be perfect in this respect—I have no idea if my feed item IDs changed when I last upgraded WordPress, for example, although I bet they did—but I’ve got a plethora of 301 Moved Permanently redirects on this site, my old one and others I manage to keep old content available. And both WaSP and Hunt kept the bulk of their URIs constant/redirected, so they’re still better than 99% of the other sites out there; the only reason I’m picking on them is that I just noticed that both feeds were dead.