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.

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