IdolHands.com :: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek
I spent some time this morning examining the technology policies of Barack Obama and John McCain. Policies aside, I was immediately struck by the differences between their web sites. So what do the two sites say about the candidates?
The candidates' platforms could not be more different: JohnMcCain(.com) relies on corporate backing for his web site, which runs on Microsoft Internet Information Server and uses ASP. Barack Obama, in contrast, relies on widespread contributions from the community, in the form of open-source web technologies (PHP and Apache).
Ask McCain's site for something that it's not expecting, and it gets very confused. It readily admits that it has no idea what just happened: maybe the page moved, or maybe you mistyped the URL. This could even be the fault of a third-party web site operator. There's helpful information provided if you happen to be the sysadmin for johnmccain.com, but if you're John Q. Webuser, you're pretty much out of luck.

Obama's site is more willing to admit that mistakes happen, and it's not laying blame on anyone. Hell, it even injects a bit of humor into the thing. The fact that even his 404 page is polished and provides navigation options shows that despite the claims of right-wing rhetoric, Obama is more prepared in case of the unexpected.

Despite his carefully cultivated "maverick" image, McCain is playing it traditional and conservative by using HTML 4.01, the W3C spec from 1999.

However, it's clear that he's not following through on his commitment to even this aging standard:

Obama shows himself to be much more progressive, adopting the 21st century XHTML 1.0 transitional standard:

But alas, even Obama has trouble conforming to the standards.

Maybe this is true of all politicians? And not to be an apologist here, but Obama is clearly more valid than McCain, and both are more valid than I am. But shouldn't we hold public officials to a higher standard?
Both candidates claim to support transparency in government, but only one clearly supports transparency (of the PNG variety) on his web site:

Obama is inclusive in his support for PNGs, accommodating even disadvantaged (Internet Explorer) users.
Obama makes it easy to find out what his technology policies are:

John McCain does not provide a clear link to his technology policy:

Instead, you have to ignore the drop-down menu, click on Issues, scroll down near the bottom of the page, and follow a link that's tucked in between talk about judicial policies and fighting crime. What's more, take a look at how each candidate identifies his technology page:

Not only is John McCain promoting case-sensitive URLs, he also prefers to hide his page names behind meaningless jargon like `cbcd3a48-4b0e-4864-8be1-d04561c132ea.htm'.
Obama is obviously the more RESTful candidate. His URLs are readable by both machines and humans, easy to remember and type, and clearly communicate both the content and context of a specific resource.

The choice is clear: a Microsoft-supported, business-as-usual site that clings to last decade's HTML standards? Or an Open Source-powered site, that not only does a better job adhering to standards but embraces change, transparency, and clear communication?
Comments
bjorn
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