One year ago, on the dawn of the 2005 General Election, I ranked the UK’s political parties by running their websites through the arbitrary gauntlet that is the W3C HTML Validator. The results were a largely horrendous mixed bag of tragic to awful, with hundreds of errors in total: the surprise of the night was that the Tories got the only thumbs-up.
So, with UK local council elections tomorrow, let’s see if anything’s changed!
A few rules: last year I checked every party with a candidate standing for my constituency, but since there are are only three candidates in my local ward I’m just going to use the same list; again, I’m not including the bee enn pee, whose URI I refuse to type; in general the page checked will be the root of each domain, but I’m ignoring any stupid splash pages and getting to news/listings that have a better potential for decent markup.
The results, in worse to slightly-less-worse order:
- Socialists – not valid, 191 errors, no doctype
- Liberal Democrats – not valid, 112 errors
- UKIP – Not valid, 107 errors, unknown parse mode, no doctype found, tries HTML 3.2(!)
- English Democrats – not valid, 55 errors
- Socialist Labour Party – not valid, 22 errors, no doctype found, unspeakably ugly, nasty frames
- Greens – not valid, 4 errors, unknown parse mode, namespace found in non-XML document
- Conservatives – not valid, 4 errors
- Labour – not valid, 1 error
No valid sites! What’re the chances?
In general, though, there’s not much improvement – just some shuffling around at the back of the class. The Most Hideously Looking (To The Point Of Being Utterly Broken In A Modern Browser) Award goes, for the second year running, to the Socialist Labour Party: it looks as if it hasn’t been touched in the last fifty-two weeks and is still incomprehensibly rubbish. Go on, take a look for yourself.
| Party | 2005 | 2006 | change? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Socialists | 103 | 191 | 88 worse |
| Tories | 0 | 4 | 4 worse |
| Socialist Labour | 20 | 22 | 2 worse |
| Labour | 1 | 1 | no change |
| Greens | 6 | 4 | 2 better |
| Lib Dems | 134 | 112 | 22 better |
| UKIP | 163 | 107 | 56 better |
| English Democrats | 177 | 55 | 122 better |
The English Democrats get Most Improvement and the Socialists are awarded Must Try Harder.
So what does this tell us about politics? Nothing, really. Which is as it should be when there’s a selection of exciting issues at stake in the real world.
[And yes, it would be foolish of me not to point out that notlikecalvin.com itself doesn't validate, and that valid markup isn't the be-all and end-all of webness. It's just a bit of fun.]
