Hayo Bethlehem
Politics!
An easy question: How to sell webstandards to political parties, or let them make an issue out of it?
Political parties aren't impressed by buzzwords. In fact, they aren't really impressed with any technology at all.
You can see technology gone wrong when suddenly lots of politicians started to podcast. These podcasts were so horrific, one could wonder if the PR-person that thought up the idea wanted to kill off podcasting once and for all. So early adoption is something better not left to politicians.
None of the Dutch political parties have a validating website. And that includes the newest party, which has "progress" as one of its key points, and wants to further facilitate democracy through the use of internet. Most websites seem to be technologically and design wise stuck in 2002, the date of the previous elections (not counting the 2003 elections, for which they did not have time to plan).
Politics is all about communication. And our government has standards for on-line communication. As political parties have always only changed their appearance during election time, we can only hope in 2007, all political parties will sport a fine, standards compliant, accessible and user-friendly website.
Back to reality, politicians aren't technologically savvy, so we'll have to trust them to listen to people who know about standards, accessibility, and usability. If they do, it will be a big leap forward for the web.
– Hayo
Page last updated Friday, November 11th 2005
Discussion
Gabriel Mihalache 11 Nov 2005 Web standards for presentation sites (static content, the equivalent of flyers) have their main advantage in that the page will render consistently in most browser.
If the existing pages already render consistently on all relevant browsers, what would be the gain in a redesign of the site?
Also, "progress" is usually a code-word for the kind of Socialist fine-tuning and large-scale interventionism that can get a contry in the state the USSR was in the late '80s.
Concerning policy, individual rights and economics issues, web standards are mostly irrelevant. So are the main concerns of various other kinds of professionals (each profession has its own obsession). That's OK.
Also, don't fall into the trap of some socialist-minded web professionals in calling for some sort of governmental bill that would require private sites to pass certain standards of accesibility and usability. This would imply that the State has a prerogative interfering in the consentual acts between 2 willing private citizens (if I don't mind visiting a old-style site, and you don't mind publishing one for me, then what business does the State have telling us what's best for us?)
The costs which businesses and site owners would have to incur to get their sites up to date, because of abusive state regulations (a breach of property rights, in fact) might or might not get offseted by higher incomes from satisfied customers. That's not the point. You can't ignore someone's property rights even if it's in their best interest.
The State has no business telling me how to use my property, nor with who and how I might make deals, contract or just meet. This is also true for sites.
If web standards give you a competitive advantage, then they'll stand out on their own, because entrepreneurs are always looking for advantages. There is no need for prozelytism beyond making sure people are aware of this alternative.
Hayo Bethlehem 11 Nov 2005 Thanks for that extremely well thought out comment, and you raise some quite interesting concerns.
Phylosophically I completely agree with your point of view. However, there's more to it (or less, if you prefer). However, in our current political system, all revolves around information. The way a political party displays information could be essential for that party during elections. Currently, you could describe their websites as an informational jungle. Especially the VVD has a horrible website, which presents the curious visitor with some formidable obstacles in between them and the information they need. The user could mistakenly interpret information in other ways then the party meant, just because the location was weird, or the site did not render well in his browser.
Thus, proper standardised ways of displaying information could be critical to political parties.
However, this is all probably subject to information-Darwinism: If the party can't structure its information, it probably shouldn't have too much power anyway!
Gabriel Mihalache 11 Nov 2005 There you go! So what these sites really need are:
- an information architecture overhaul,
- some serious SEO (the kind where you use proper markup and thoughtful copy; not the kind where you keyword-spam)
- and 1-2 people working full time on updating pages and getting content ready for the web (including re-writes, since other kinds of documents are too large for a web audience, etc.)
Good sites shouldn't be an "issue" for politics but rather make the object of an offer made to any of these organizations by a team which knows what it's doing.
The best scenario I can think of is if a team of knowledgeable web professionals offers a complete website restructuring and rewrite, as well as scheduled maintenance at a competitive price (and with a good portfolio of succesful projects)
If such an organization/party were to consistently refuse the offers it would receive then it would incur a net loss... that's punishment enough for them ;-)
Anyway, my point about opposing people trying to regulate the net, trying to tell us what's good for us and what isn't, is something I get a lot of negative comments about. Even so, I stand by my point and that's why I made it here also.