I have this disturbing lack of confidence in both presidential candidates. I don’t really want either of them. Today I was trying to decide who to vote for because, well, it is election day. I was walking into the office from lunch when it dawned on me: the best way to pick a president is based on their website.
Presidential Candidate Websites.
Shock and horror came over me as I scanned their websites. There was stuff all over the place, explosive gradients and backgrounds that simply don’t jive. Youtube videos are injected in every nook and cranny. Since both websites are full of crap I don’t fell like reading or watching, I thought that I’d go a step further and do a good ol’ W3C Markup Validation on them. The results were astounding to say the least.
John McCain: 171 Errors, 46 Warnings (217 problems)
Source: W3C
Barack Obama: 220 Errors, 37 Warnings (257 problems)
Source: W3C
You would think that with the Democratic party doing anything and everything to get Barack all over the media, news, magazines, to the point where I check under my bed at night to make sure he’s not there, they would have made sure his website was W3C compliant. If he wins, what does that say about their concern for web standards. It makes his “net neutrality” talks sound like complete crap. McCain’s site is not much better than Obama’s but the fact is that McCain’s site is better. Winning is winning.
You’d think that my selection process would be over, but you would be wrong.
VP Candidates.
I went to JoeBiden.com and SarahPalin.com and both were serious let downs. Biden freeloads off of Obama’s website. Palin’s website says “This space intentionally left blank.” Serious disappointment. Not even a picture of Palin for me to hang up on the wall of my gun locker. Biden too… dude what’s up with that? You gotta have Obama carry you through the whole damn election? Complete rubbish from both the elephant and the ass.
For giggles, I ran ‘em through anyway…
Sarah Palin: 5 Errors, 0 Warnings
Joe Biden: 72 Errors, 29 Warnings
…and let me tell you, I did giggle quite a bit.
Because of how atrocious both VP candidates’ sites are, I won’t be including them in my decision. Their awfulness cancels each other out. If you wanted to play a numbers game though, Biden’s piggybacking on Obama’s site does more hurt than good.
The Tie Breaker.
Don’t listen to my drivel. This blog post is balderdash. You shouldn’t judge your presidential candidate based on how compliant their website is with W3C standards, even if I am. When you don’t like either candidate, you need to pick one small issue that you can judge the candidates on go from there. That’s the tie breaker. Could be something as lofty as religious beliefs or something as trivial as who has a better choice of neck ties.
Fact of the matter is, you need to go out and vote, no matter how irrational and illogical your selection process might be.
Update
Just tested Change.gov and I’m slightly more impressed. Seems like since Obama is now president-elect he is able to rocket past anything McCain could ever compose with a WYSIWYG with a cup of coffee. He has created quite a website that is pretty damn compliant.
Change.gov: 20 Errors, 3 Warning
This makes me feel much better, because the one thing that keeps me up at night is web standards. Seems like we’re getting much closer to changing.
