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Review of the Presidential Web Sites' HTML
Crispen writes, "My dad, the Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen, recently reviewed the presidential candidates' Web sites. He didn't review their style, mind you -- he reviewed their HTML.
If you are looking for one of the most revealing (and humorous) commentaries about the current U.S. presidential race, take a look."
The entire text below this story (in the front /. page) appears in italics. How ironic, wrong HTML in a story about wrong HTML ;-)
Just to make sure no one misses it -- Harry Browne, libertarian, has the least errors reported by validator.w3.org. (Which is pretty surprizing -- it's hard to make a site that ugly validate).
If this is what he understands as open source then I'm voting for perot.
"Thanks for checking out our source code! I plan to use this space to post
special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making
our source code the best it can be. The fact that you are peeking behind the
scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet
effort. I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign. Now let's
keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!
Al Gore"
It's nice to see the campaign web pages taking a cue from the best porn pages with the pop up windows. George w Bush's popup takes you straight to a secure server for your $$$.
Its an interesting concept; this HTML, are we the only people who go sifting through the source; just for the hell of it?
:)
At the end of the day, if its readable with the browser; thats all it ever needed to be - is there any real need to go nit-picking?
On the other hand it can only ever be good nettiquet to, if you find unworkable HTML, inform the webmaster so he make his page available to everyone.......
If you really want to generate your own unspeakably bad HTML, go to this page and look for information on this little companys' HTML editor, you'll probably (not) be surprised at how much you have to pay for it
Please do not check my HTML cos i've already checked it and it is definately cr*p
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Official political party sites
Democratic National Committee
Democratic Socialists of America
Green Parties of North America
Labor Party
Libertarian Party
Natural Law Party
Reform Party
Republican National Committee
Socialist Party USA
Workers Party
Official candidate sites
Gary Bauer
Bill Bradley
Pat Buchanan
George W. Bush
Steve Forbes
Al Gore
Orrin Hatch
Alan Keyes
John McCain
Donald Trump
Btw, not everyone's still running. Get involved in politics. Change the course of history. Can anyone get a candidates position of support or non-support concerning the DeCSS-DVD-MPAA issue? Interesting to see Gore running Linux, and Bradley and him using Apache. And though McCain may not be on MS, he does have some skeletons in the proverbial web-closet: McCain pay-chat a Microsoft affair
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Looks like slashdot has quite a few errors , Click here to check it out
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
But what gets me is how many of them are in the commercial comain, .com Does that mean you can buy them? 'Hi, I'm Al Gore, and I'm
running this candidacy as a commercial operation...'I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I've seen a rapid increase in sites that assume that shockwave plugins are available for Lynx.
No joke. Often, I like using a simple browser to cut through the fancy schmancy graphics and get down to the text message. Its what humans speak.
Many times I surf the int-r-net from a Wyse-60 terminal under lynx and appreciate getting just the facts. A little formatting is nice and a bit of confusion is expected, but what I saw on georgewbush.com was jibberish that only Ronald Regan could mumble off:
[nav_shadow_rt_mid.gif]
[nav_shadow_left_mid.gif] [ISMAP:nav_youth.gif]-[USEMAP:nav_youth.gif]
[nav_shadow_rt_mid.gif]
[nav_shadow_left_mid.gif]btn_red_2.gif (60 bytes) btn_red_2.gif (60 bytes) btn_red_2.gif (60 bytes)
What is his message? Between all that I can see a secret message in there. He wants money.
Sure it is. I use it often when: :-( )
* I connect throught telnet into a host that have inet access from one that doesn't
* I use a X-less linux (quite often)
* I need to solve a chicken/egg problem to get web access (for instance, OmniWeb betas, the OPENSTEP browser come with a limited license. When it expires, you cannot launch it. And the only way to get the updated beta is to use http.
* I have a sloppy connection and need to get something (often a driver)
* I want to read pages/documentation offline from a terminal
* I'm tired of those animated gifs, those crappy colored background, those stupid text colors. It is amazing the amount of information you can display readabily in text mode on a 132x60 screen.
* I want to browse without spreading cookies everywhere
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Absolutely. I use it because it's so much faster than Netscape. At the end of the day, I'm rarely interested in how good the graphics are on a site, I'm after the content. I still have Netscape around, and use it for sites where the graphic content is important, but there's a place for both.
It's also not a case of actively supporting Lynx (or any other browser, for that matter). Any HTML 4.0 compliant page should be easily visible in any browser, including Lynx (yes, few current browsers fully implement HTML 4.0 yet, but they're getting there). What part of Lynx support do you think holds back advances? I'm not advocating support for Mosaic or Chimera, I'm merely hoping for standards compliant web pages. If I choose to use a browser that doesn't implement certain aspects of a page (e.g., images) that should be my choice.
Lynx is also great for those of us that have to do dial in support. When your only connection to the internet is through an 80x24 telnet window, and you *need* to check some details in order to fix a customer's problem, Netscape and IE aren't an option.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Hmmm. He seems to like assuming that all HTML on the web is done in some sort of HTML Editor, like FrontPage, Netscape, etc. What about hand written. There is at least one page there that looks very hand written to me, and I would even take it that others (with no DTD) are also hand written. I know I'm constantly leaving out the DTD when I'm writing a page, and I always capitalise my tags, and use indentation.
If anyone would like to review my code, please take a look at the website I manage...
Artane Senior Band web page
T.
Remember, Al-Gorithms drive the net...perhaps there is more to his claim of creation than meets the eye...
rootrot
Your page is missing some stuff. Mostly some type declarations and an alt tag, but there's no reason to be sloppy.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I use Lynx because with it I gan curcumvent my company's proxy server. I ssh into my box at home and use Lynx to do research, download cracks, lookup hacking info, and look at ASCII art pr0n. When other techs can't get info from Deja.com because the proxy server is down, I'll look it up for them with Lynx and give them the answer. Funny thing is, I can never get any info from support.microsoft.com.
Your page needs a little help yet.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Like his platform? Nope.
;-)
Man of strong character? Nope.
Runs his website on Linux? THATS MY MAN
Maybe voters should do what they did last time and vote for the cute guy
For the forward-looking:
The W3C's XHTML 1.0 spec states in part:
While the article was funny, at one point he says something stupid about albore's choice of Raven over mod_ssl.
;-).
It's quite simple--Albore lives in the USSA, where RSA is patented and mod_ssl is illegal to use for commercial purposes (such as campaign fund-raising). Raven comes with a commercial RSA license, which you can never buy alone (trust me, I've tried).
What I generally do for normal commercial sites I set up in the USSA is use mod_ssl and have a shiny shrink-wrapped copy of Red Hat's Secure Web Server with it and hope that, if busted, I can claim the RSA license in the RH Server covers the RSA in the mod_ssl (I use RH because it *is* mod_ssl and because it's cheaper
I wouldn't dream of doing that for a presidential campaign web site though--the bad press if we were charged and lost would be hard to deal with.
I am often accused of joking, or "trolling"
I think Troll was probably a bit harsh. Even if you were, it is an opinion held by a lot of people, but Moderators will moderate.
Lynx does not even display the banner ads
I see your point. And that is a reasonably sound business reason to ignore Lynx. What I find irritating is that a lot of companies selling products have sites that need Shockwave. How much effort do they think I'm willing to go to for a company that doesn't think it should cater to me? A lot of people have to download the latest version of shockwave, and this means they need to stop and resstart their browser (Or is this just under Unix?) Which is also a problem.
All that matters is that 99.7% of our target demographic has access to the de-facto standard - IE4
Including me when I'm at work. It requires me to search through a list of menus for a program that does essentially the same as Netscape just to view a page in which it benefits YOU for me to look at it. If you aren't interested in my custom then I'm not interested in your product.
those that do not are not worth spending my client's money on. Its basic business logic.
But it doesn't cost more to develop a site that works on more browsers. You don't need to create one site per browser. Most of the time all you need to do is load it onto a browser and fix a handful of minor bugs. Anyone who doesn't do this is cutting down the number of visitors for a trivial saving in costs.
we've come to expect that our politicians will all be incompetent, so it's no surprise that they hire incompetent staff.
I'm sure they'd be happy to have you volunteer to fix all their problems. It's unlikely that anyone gets paid to work on these sites...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
There isn't a Slashdot Giveaway
This is a bored individual who enjoys misleading people and generating unnecessary email.
Official VA promotions will always be posted on the VA Linux website.
Sorry for the confusion that has been created.
--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
The simplicity of the Libertarian page is not out of lack of ambition, but it is a metaphorical display of the simplicity of their platform.
;-)
WOO! Go Libertarians! 7 Errors! How many do you think that they would make as president? And BSD! At least if Browne starts sleeping around and we have a nice little scandal, we'll know that he's better in bed than those NT candidates
Eh...
If I recall correctly, "officially" running for president is merely a matter signing up with the FEC. This won't get you on the ballot, though. In that, the restrictions vary wildly by state. In some states, the restrictions are bad enough that only the two major parties get on. In others, pretty much any party who signs up gets on. In my state (California), we tend to have the following parties on the ballot:
When you register to vote, you pick on of these, or you can choose "Independent" (No party. Not to be confused with "American Independent", which is a party) or "Decline to State". Something like 1/3 of the population is independent, up quite a bit recently.
Usually, the total vote for all but the first two parties is somewhere between 5 and 10%. However, the press blackout of minor parties is so bad, that the media typically reports only the totals for the two parties.
As part of an earlier effort at "campaign finance reform", candidates get an extra dollar for every dollar they raise ("matching funds") assuming their party got more the somewhere between 5 and 15% of the vote. (I don't recall which, exactly.) Obviously this boosts the major parties and marginalizes the fringe parties. Also, the American public, for some unknown reason, only regards those candidates that the press annoints. In this election, they've annointed just four, and report as if there are only four men running, despite the fact that the sample ballot for the primary election coming up in California I just received has twenty people listed as running for President.
Anyway, this media blackout of minor candidates is mostly what causes the cash requirement. Unless you spend a fortune advertising, you won't get mentioned on the news.
Finally, in most elections, you actually have the right to vote for anyone who meets the eligibility requirements. A "write-in" candidacy. I could, for example, demand a write in ballot next november and vote for myself for president. (I'll turn 35 in August. Remember that, voters.) Write-ins are rare, but not unheard of. San Francisco had a well-publicized write-in candidacy that succeeded in forcing a run-off last year in its mayors race.
(Oh, and the "American Communist Party" still exists, as far as I know, but is so weak as to be a joke and has been since before WWII.)
The cake is a pie
But that doesn't matter, because in the US, presidents aren't elected by popular vote, anyway.
Actually it used to, in an earlier iteration of the site (6-12 months ago, if I remember).
At the time, that message said something to the effect of
Thanks for checking out our source code! We believe in community participation in making our HTML code better -- it's OPEN SOURCE -- yadda yadda...
That's very paraphrased, but I did find it funny that the statement really did have "OPEN SOURCE" in all caps, like it was specifically targeted to get the attention of the geek community. Eventually, somebody probably told Gore or his webmaster that the concept of "open source HTML" doesn't make much sense.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Al Gore Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) secured_by_Raven/1.4.2 PHP/4.0b3 Linux
Al is the only one using Linux and Apache (SSL/PHP EVEN!)
Also he (or more likely one of this web designers hide some stuff in the html source, now that is just fun for everyone.
Al Gore also invented the Internet, making all this possiable, as for me I am putting my vote on the Gore man. Geek vote counts, vote Al Gore because Al Gore voted Linux (in his choice of web server).
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Didn't you read last Friday's /. interview with Gore's webmaster? According to one of the questions, algore2000 began its life all-Microsoft. It was converted to Linux as a cost saving measure at the same time they were moving their campaign headquarters, also to save costs. He went into some detail about how the ASPs were moved to PHP.
It's probably fair to say that some of this cruft is an artifact of platform conversion, some due to the original composition software, and of course, the author. But they did solicit feedback. Have you sent any?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Bush lays his use of Front Page out there and says, so what? -- and that who-cares attitude is also reflected in his web page which sets a new standard for user-unfriendliness. Even on a SPARC with the entire page in cache, it still takes over 20 seconds for Netscape to show you anything but a blank white page.
I can't believe the guy has the gall to blame the suckiness of Netscape on the web site. Particularly Netscape under Unix, which is god-awful slow on every web site.
--
No one should write their pages specifically for lynx: but then they shouldn't for IE or NS either. If you write your web pages in a flexible manner, more people will find the content easy to access (and not just people: also hits bringing web crawlers).
Looks like Harry Browne's page uses xhtml transitional - with all the lowercase tags. That would make him by far the best, as that's now the official w3c recommendation.
Incidentally, anyone know where a good comprehensive xhtml tutorial would be? Or a good xhtml WYSIWYG editor?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Check this link out:
AndoverNews
This is just too funny.
------
IanO
------
Objects in Mirror are Losing!
NT 4.0 comes with IE 2. This version can't access www.microsoft.com. No alternate page, nothing. Just a message like "You don't have permission to list the virtual directory /". In order to download IE, the easiest thing to do is to get Netscape (any old one will do) then go back to the Microsoft website with Netscape, wade through the ActiveXisms and get an IE.
I'm no zealot. I use Linux/Netscape for most things, but I think IE 5 is one of the best graphical browsers for stability and speed on any platform. However, the fact that 2.0 can't access www.microsoft.com suggests some serious issues on both ends.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Shouldn't slashdot be a big enough tent to hold HTML bigots and HTML slackers? ;-)
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
It is worth noting that the Bush site is the only major canditate running his site on NT. It is also the only site that got defaced. weld@l0pht.com
Thus, smaller HTML files! :-)
cpeterso
Personally, I think that what OS and server software that the candidates are running is much more interesting than how good their HTML is.
Note: George W. Bush, Pat Buchanan, and this "Erik Thompson" are all running IIS on NT4.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
The code, IMHO is good clean code. The site has been kept current and up to date for the past few months, and the numbers for what matters to these guys are good: fundraising. Bradley's site has raised the second largest online contribution base (behind McCain's) and with the idea of selling campaign stuff like bumper stickers and signs before they give it out free in that area is good. Think about it. Resources are committed to Washington this week: you live in Florida and realy want a Bradley sign in your yard. Pay for the sign, help the candidate and keep those freebie where they are needed most: the site of this weeks primary. George W's site is Front Page, and it shows. Then again, he's only raised like $400,000 online. Whens the last time you saw a URL behind Junior during a press briefing or town hall meeting? McCain's Website PR is slick. He mentions the URL in every debate when Internet Taxes are brought up, and that stays in the sound bite. Gore's URL is splashed behind him some (like in NH durring his victory speech) but what Net Savy person gives the "father of the internet" the time of day? What will be interesting to see is what Hillary's site will be like, esp. in the biography section. BTW - if you wanna look at my code, go ahead. http://www.listen.to/9412 http://www.agfamonotype.com http://studio.agfamonotype.com (going thru redesign) Chris J. Popp Webmaster Agfa Monotype Corp.
Streaming Classic Rock mp3's 24/7 on 9412 - The Rock Station www.listen.to/9412
Wrong. My blind friends prefer IE over Lynx, as navigating with Lynx is much more difficult. Major problems with Lynx: frames and forms, although the latter is difficult on IE as well.
-- Abigail
Yes. Not because it's Lynx, but if your webpages are geared towards a specific display (and then you might as well have used a medium other than HTML), your pages won't be useful in many other situations. Text-based browsers are not old technology, nor used by poor people who cannot afford a decent PC (as many people designing commercial websites believe). Handheld devices (like some Nokia phones) and certain cars (some expensive German cars have this option) have web browsing capabilities, without the pictures. And then there's the (UK based) 'www-by-phone' service. And let's not forget the indexers and web-spiders. Scooter and friends are blind.
-- Abigail
While it is true that Lynx can be "joined" with software to read out text aloud, it's a myth to believe IE or Netscape can't. There's pretty decent (Windows based) software out there that reads out anything that uses fonts. Including IE.
-- Abigail
Which makes him a big hypocrite, as the web page has at the top:
META NAME="GENERATOR" Content="Visual Page 2.0 for Windows"
-- Abigail
Some serious problems with Rev. Bob HTML:
Rev. Bob is a big hypocrite, and slashdot shouldn't have lowered itself to publishing a story about it.
-- Abigail
on just those pages that sighted readers obtain dismal results with
lynx.
I am sorry if I suggested that NS and IE *can't* be used with such
software, though in my limited experience, it is more common to use
leaner browsers such as lynx with these tools.
Nope. If you write good HTML, Lynx, search engines, and the deaf will take care of themselves. You can concentrate on supporting graphical browsers by adding stuff on for them.
Yes, i know, HTML isn't perfect (i'm not blaming anyone in particular), and doing so will limit you from some (usually annoying) site designs. If you want to use one of those (usually annoying) site designs....
cheers,
sklein
I have several close friends that are blind. All of them use IE, and only one sometimes uses Lynx. IE's superior formatting compared to Lynx makes that the blind people I know prefer IE. Frames and forms are the biggest problem.
-- Abigail