Tomorrow’s the UK General Election, and I’m summoning up all the democratic gumption I can to haul myself out of bed and vote before work. But the big question has to be who to vote for? We’re overrun by the usual parties – plus some exciting special guests! – in my constituency, so a game of pin-the-vote-on-the-party could lead to an unwelcome surprise. Imagine my dilemma!
Naturally, I’ve got my own ideas about where that magic X will land once I get into my very own novelty voting booth, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to find a slightly more webcentric diviner of political fortunes: given the incredibly spurious nature of popularity-seeking policies in this day and age, why not let the equally unpredictable W3C HTML validator sort the cads from the bounders?
I ran markup checks on the homepage of each party that’s standing in my area (with the exception of the BNP: I refuse to even type that URI in case someone, somewhere is watching and judging). At first I went with the page at the root of each domain, but loads of them have stupid splashpages – I was more interested in the news/listings-style pages that could easily be properly coded.
How many would actually validate? How many errors would the others throw up? The results were surprising…
In sort-of bad-to-better order:
- English Democrats – Not valid, 177 errors
- UKIP – Not valid, no doctype, 163 errors
- Liberal Democrats – Not valid, 134 errors
- Socialist Party – Not valid, no doctype, 103 errors
- Socialist Labour Party – Not valid, no doctype, uses frames, incredibly ugly, 20 errors
- Green Party – Not valid, 6 errors
- Labour Party – Not valid, 1 error (missing an ID attribute)
- Conservative Party – Valid!
Believe me, I was as amazed as you might be – the Tories, secretly habouring valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional code on their website! Having said that, the splash page at conservatives.com does have a crappy WMV file on it (and trying to find their URI produced the most popup-tastic link-farms of the night), so that would knock it several spots down the ranking if this was any sort of serious assessment of Britain’s political powerhouses. Which it’s not. Right?
The Most Hideously Looking (To The Point Of Being Utterly Broken In A Modern Browser) Award goes – by a landslide – to the Socialist Labour party for their quite incomprehensible tragedy of missing framesets. It’s a damn shame to see so many parties have lost their doctypes along with their good sense, and I for one am disappointed that the Greens haven’t taken the opportunity to fully embrace web standards as part of their vision for a cleaner Britain.
But the biggest upset of the night has to be for Gordo Kennedy’s gang of loveable chumps: obviously, in their enthusiasm to rush into the Westminster big leagues they’ve been too busy to properly check their code… just like they’re too busy to send a birthday card to their mum. Some flowers would be nice, too. [sniff]
So there you go. If you love web standards as much as you love your country you’ll want to vote Conservative tomorrow.
…
Oh, God! What’ve I done!
Of course, it’s all a bit of fun. I wish I’d thought of this with a bit more than eight hours until the polls open, and then we could’ve got up to all sorts of stylesheet- and accessibility-validating pranks. Still, let’s hope there’s more to politics than websites, eh?
(And yes, I’m perfectly aware that notlikecalvin itself doesn’t actually validate, and that validation isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of webness. Boo sucks.)
[ Parliament | Local ]
