Author: Peter

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.

Life of the party

Tonight is the company Chri…er, holiday party. It’ll be the fourth I’ve attended in the 10 years I’ve been working there. The last one I was at was six years ago at an inn an hour outside of town; about 11pm I was fed up and left the event, and I got up out of bed and left the inn entirely about three hours later. Truth be told, I’m only going to this one because a coworker who’s also a close friend convinced me to… and even then, I’m leaving early to go see Harmony Trowbridge.

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.

Star candidates

Further to the idea of star candidates, I’m somewhat in favour of them if they’re qualified for the jobs they’re given. Marc Garneau, for example, would be an ideal science minister, but probably not the best defense minister; similarly, banker and economist Paul Summerville’s expertise would serve him well in the finance portfolio but not necessarily as heritage minister. (I honestly can’t see former news anchor Peter Kent in any governing role.)

That said, there’s something unsavoury about parachuting these candidates into ridings in place of local representatives. Michael Ignatieff not only hasn’t lived in his riding for several years, he hasn’t even lived in the country… but his resumé is impressive. It seems to me there should be a way to get these people involved in government without losing the benefits to a riding that a local candidate can provide.

Star candidate

Wow again. Marc Garneau, the first Canadian astronaut and (until today) head of the Canadian Space Agency, is running for the Liberals.

This morning’s edition of The Current included a panel discussion of star candidates by some of them. The Garneau announcement came after the broadcast, but if the term is applicable to anyone, I think he’s it.