Greens’ Harris on CBC

Jim Harris, leader of the Green Party, was on CBC’s The National last night in one of their interactive Your Turn segments. Before I watched all I really knew was that the Greens are focused on the environment… and afterwards, that’s still all I know about their platform. I’ll give this to Harris, though: he’s an expert at spinning any question back to his issue. The discussion went something like this:

“Mr. Harris, what does the Green Party have to say about the Gomery inquiry?” “There’s a much bigger scandal in Canada, and that’s the government’s policy on the environment.”

“Mr. Harris, what are you going to do about high income taxes?” “We’re going to put a tax on gas, but it’s not a gas tax, it’s a save-the-environment tax.”

“Mr. Harris, what is the Green Party’s policy on national child care?” “Our children won’t have a future if we don’t fix the environment for them today.”

“Mr. Harris, what about unemployment?” “Canada’s got a good profile for wind power, and we’re going to be creating green-collar jobs in that industry.”

About the only answer Harris gave that he didn’t reroute to the environment was to complain that his party doesn’t get covered by the media… apparently oblivious to the fact that he was doing so on national television. (Host Peter Mansbridge was quite pointed in reminding Harris of that, not once but twice.)

I’m not sure whether the purpose of Harris’s appearance was to show Canadians that the Greens aren’t just a single-issue party or if it was to show that they are. I do know that by refusing to provide substantial answers to numerous legitimate questions, particularly those on which any party serious about governing should have well-defined stances, he made it much less likely that I’ll consider a Green vote.

…not as I do?

It puzzles me to no end why a large majority of the important tools that are needed to build Java applications for settop boxes are written in compiled languages and provided only in Windows executable form.

This isn’t an idle complaint, by the way. I started rebuilding one of those tools in Java tonight, going from an algorithm in a specification (and I use the terms algorithm and specification loosely). Fortunately it’s going quickly: in just over three hours, including puzzling over the algorithm—which, despite being defined as an extension to another algorithm in another spec, is almost entirely different—and learning the relevant Java APIs, it’s about half done and well on its way to being an Ant task to boot. But this is at least the seventh time I’ve had cause to do something like this, and it’s getting really really old.

Specific harm

MOE: I’m a well-wisher, in that I don’t wish you any specific harm.

Sleazy downtown nightclub Club Phoenix has been shut down due to incidents where patrons used beer bottles as weapons and a minor was served alcohol. And I really don’t wish them any specific harm… but still, my thoughts are more along the lines of another Simpsons character:

Ha ha!

Three agents and a student

Of the four candidates from national parties running in the local riding, three are real estate agents and one is a university student. Only one has his own website, and surprisingly (to me, anyway) it’s not the student. Doesn’t mean anything, necessarily, I just find it interesting.

Conservative candidate John Mazzilli is the only one with his own domain, a webpage hosted on GeoCities. It includes an email address, phone number and address of his riding office.

Green candidate Stuart Smith doesn’t have a site of his own, but he has contributed one original item to a shared site for the three city-riding candidates. His page on the party website lists email and phone number, plus the office and contact info for the riding association.

NDP runner Stephen Maynard also doesn’t have a site of his own, but at least the party has a page for him which lists an email address and phone number… good, since apparently he’s had nothing to say about his candidacy.

Liberal MP Joe Fontana doesn’t appear to have a website of his own—the obvious guess, joefontana.ca, is closed—and his Parliamentary homepage is currently down because The security policy for your network prevents your request from being allowed at this time. The Liberal site doesn’t list a website or email address for him; they don’t even show a riding office! Fortunately the Google cache of the Ottawa site is still around, although I’d wager that very few of the people in the riding would think to use it.

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.

More website notes

Some stream-of-consciousness impressions as I go through the big three party websites.

NDP: features a prominent “youth” link on the main page. Nice. Items in the RSS feed are just a headline and a one-sentence summary; I want full content! Why am I only getting the “rapid response” items in my aggregator? There are lots of headlines and stories and they must be posted somewhere. Aha… the RSS feed on the headlines page covers all categories. There’s no indication that feeds are different, boo. This is a nice-looking site… I’ve never been a big fan of the green-and-orange colour scheme, but it’s toned down or integrated better, making everything more appealing to the eye than either of the other two.

Conservatives: next in the menus after “founding principles” is “c-boutique”, the party store. Seems apt. As long as I use Flashblock I can see the dropdown menus, but now I can’t navigate into them because they disappear as soon as I move the mouse from the menu title. Fortunately the title is clickable, but that only gets me to the first item and there’s no navigation to the rest. The tour blog… no RSS feed which means I probably won’t see it again. Started off a little lighthearted and focused on the campaign, but quickly gets into anti-Liberal rhetoric. Strange that it’s anonymous… the writer refers to him/herself but isn’t named. Who is “I”?

Curiouser and curiouser:

By now, I’m sure you’ve had a chance to visit the tour blog. [javascript: link excised –ed.] It’s being written by a good friend of mine from inside Harper’s bus!

Like the official Conservative campaign blog, and despite the familiar tone with which the above is written, the “youth blog” is also entirely anonymous. Reading the “About Us” page doesn’t help either: Who are we? We are young conservatives…. we are CPC Energy.

Liberals: Feschuk’s campaign blog is funny, but there’s no and now there’s an RSS feed. Hey, why don’t you add one to be nice to that minion of Jason Kenney’s? Might as well let him/her misinterpret your posts on the fly. Podcasting link looks interesting but there’s no content yet—see previous RSS comment. Hmm, the Liberals have youth, women’s, seniors and aboriginal “commissions” (which I guess are internal party groups). Too bad they’re logos with tiny burned-in graphical text… I don’t know many seniors who’ll be able to see the graphic meant for them, and the aboriginal peoples logo is almost unreadable in those colours at that size.

Sheesh, it’s 2 a.m.? That’s enough for tonight.

Election tech

Thought I’d do a quick objective review of the big three national political party websites from a technology perspective. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, although one is an obvious leader.

The NDP party website is run with open-source software. They have an RSS feed (although it’s not <link/>ed for autodetection and easy subscription). The site is functional—it’s nice to see a Search form—and accessible (as judged by Lynx).

Next on the list are the Liberals. Their site is run with what appears to be custom-developed software (written in .NET, which means they’re running on a Windows server). There’s no RSS in sight, and not even a prominent form to sign up for party news via e-mail. Lynx shows pages full of [left_main_pic.gif], [spacer.gif], and the like, but at least it’s logically laid out so you can navigate through the whole site.

Then there are the Conservatives. The website is built on commercial PHP-based software. Unfortunately it features a lot of Flash-for-Flash’s sake, which (in Firefox at least) means their Javascript dropdown menus are completely hidden behind the slideshows of static images. (There’s also a fairly major problem with the fading text in the “banner”, which is cutting off lowercase characters’ descenders… familv, communitv, unitv.) They do have a unique feature in targeted RSS feeds: you can choose from stories, press releases, speeches, and so on. Accessibility is a beast though. Navigation links are all jammed together (VolunteerDonateJoineNews SignupSend an eCardRequest a lawn signContact Us) and there are a few [cpc-ReadMore.jpg] image placeholders visible; worst of all, though, is that content is intermingled with sidebars, headers, footers, etc., with a lot of each page’s unique material relegated to the very bottom of the page.

So I think the conclusion is obvious: If it were all about the technology, the NDP would have my vote. Of course, they haven’t chosen a candidate in my riding yet…. And now they have: Stephen Maynard.

Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately, none of the sites detects the language the browser prefers. Both the Conservative and NDP websites default to English but provide a link to the French version; the Liberal site makes the user choose on its splash screen, which I guess is marginally better.