26 March 2006
PM Website: Antiquated
Here's an excellent commentary on the state of the Prime Minister's website. Stephen Taylor calls for "A new, refreshed and modern web presentation of the Prime Ministerial website..."
The Prime Minister's current website "remains quite simplistic in its presentation and web standards..." (Yes!)
"...quite antiquated..." (True.)
Screenshot date: March 25, 2006
For larger image, click on thumbnail
For comparison:
Prime Minister of Great Britain website
Prime Minister of Australia website
Prime Minister of New Zealand website
Prime Minister of France website
Prime Minister of Sweden website
Prime Minister of Japan website
Prime Minister of India website
Prime Minister of Pakistan website
Prime Minister of Bangladesh website
Prime Minister of Jamaica website
Prime Minister of Sri Lanka website
Premier of Cambodia website
Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea website
Prime Minister of Kuwait website
Prime Minister of Slovenia website
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago website
Prime Minister of Belize website
over the years:
For larger image, click on thumbnail
[Later update, April 8, 2006 23:45 UTC]: Here's a specific example of antiquated:
This photograph of the Queen, as displayed in the Prime Minister's home page, is tiny, just 85×73 pixels — the size of an ordinary postage stamp as it appears on a monitor screen. The file size is a miniscule 8.4 kilobytes.
This image would be small even for for a thumbnail serving as a link to a larger image, but this is not a thumbnail — it is the best this official website can do for Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her eightieth birthday. This would have been an appropriate image in 1996, when hard drive storage space cost $600 per gigabyte, and the fastest Internet connection available in most homes in Canada was just 14 kilobits (not bytes) per second. But this is 2006, when hard drive storage space costs only 60¢ per gigabyte, and more than half of homes have connections faster than dial-up, and even dial-up connections operate at 58 kilobits per second.
Today, for 1¢ (one cent, that's retail with all taxes included) you can buy enough hard drive space to store more than 2000 of these tiny images. Saving money could not have been the reason why they decided to use this tiny image. Seems to me the designers of this site are simply many years behind the times, using small images as was appropriate for the way things were in the mid-1990s, and not comprehending the current circumstances.
# posted by Ambrose Bierce @ 3/26/2006 07:54:00 a.m. UTC 
Comments:
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Looks good - I could not find the Nova Scotia Hansard!
What is the purpose of the Word Verification
What is the purpose of the Word Verification
# posted by 
: 26 March, 2006 17:54
: 26 March, 2006 17:54
At this time, there are three provincial Hansards not yet included: Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. These will be done ASAP.
The Word Verification is a spam-fighting tactic, widely used over the last few months. My understanding is that spam robots cannot decipher those twisted graphics, thus cannot insert comments without human intervention.
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The Word Verification is a spam-fighting tactic, widely used over the last few months. My understanding is that spam robots cannot decipher those twisted graphics, thus cannot insert comments without human intervention.
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