European Parliament: Nil Point

13 September 2005

BBC News reports on the launch of a new site for the European Parliament. With the intention of putting a ‘friendlier face’ to a parliamentary body who has historically felt very distant to most, if not all, European citizens, you would have thought that only good things can come from this.

But oh dear. With the whole of Europe to pick from, the European Parliament has somehow managed to get a site built by people who don’t know how to build web sites. Who’da thunk it?

I wish this came as a surprise and a shock, resulting is slack-jawed gasps from all corners of a continent, but truthfully this is something that has come to be expected. If multinationals are characterised by their total disregard for any kind of standards, governing bodies are characterised by a token nod to what they should be doing, followed by blatant flouting of the rules of the DOCTYPE they’ve so diligently declared.

There’s a turnout for the books – politicians saying one thing and then doing another.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Skip Chris: Dearie me, that’s unpleasant!

For anyone wanting to take part in some polite lobbying, the contact form may be useful! :)
§ will: I tried filling out the form to contact the webmaster, but a Javascript error prevented it from working. What’s more, the submit buttons ironically said “cancel” and “validate”. See here:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/toolbox/contact.do?language=en#
§ Jesse: Just a guess, but I bet it fell victim to design by committee and ‘lowest bidder’ syndrome. That or they assigned the bulk of the work to an admin assistant ;)
§ Karl: Unbelievable, I tried the contact form with Firefox (no joy) so I fire up IE6 and once more click on the “Contact” link (opens in a new window). I write my bit and then just before sending I decided to go find the accessibility policy statement. I clicked on “Index” and bugger me if the window used for the contact form wasn’t replaced with my new page request without a back button :o

Incredibly shoddy.
§ Ronan: (french, lives in London)
Mate I can’t believe this… This is just a scandal that our own European Parliament isn’t even capable of hiring a company that simply knows what ‘building a website’ means. Aren’t you guys tired of finding out about all these sites being delivered by uncompetent ones?
§ James: And what is up with those random XML namespaces:

table xmlns:RT="http://www.europarl.eu.int/publication.engineRT" xmlns:pe="http://www.europarl.eu.int/publication.engine" xmlns:hp="ec.ep.webpub.refeur.service.publication.util.Utils" xmlns:psa="ec.ep.webpub.refeur.service.publication.runtime.PublicationServiceAccessor" xmlns:xalan="http://xml.apache.org/xalan" class="alerttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" border="0" width="100%">

...as if table-based markup wasn’t bloated enough already :P
§ Miles: We must bombard them with messages about this – how dare they put the laws on the books and flout them like this!!
§ Rijk: Your complaint would be more convincing if you told the direct negative consequences of the errors made. Pleasing the Validator is not a goal in itself.
§ bruce: Seems like you can’t submit the contact us form without JavaScript, either. The stupid eejits.
§ MH: I agree with Rijk. Sure the markup is horrible, but do you think the EU Parliament is checking that? It’s not the best-looking site I’ve ever seen, but on the surface it seems ok. Is it so surprising that a bunch of bureaucrats have a website with FONT tags? That they don’t practice what they preach?

I’m more disgusted by the continued use of random stock photography…
§ mr: This monument to incompetence cost 1.2 MILLION euros, took 1 year to complete, and will require a budget of 500,000 euros per year to “upgrade” (whatever that means!). Bravo.
§ Brady J. Frey: Who’s the firm that designed this job, was it in-house? I’ve seen better templates.

and I thought my local governments accessibility statement and poor coding habits were sloppy:
http://sfgov.org/site/mainpages_index.asp?id=39
§ LintHuman: Most of the EU Web site (europa.eu.int) is pretty badly designed, both on and beneath the surface. But the sheer scale of the operation is daunting. Who knows how many different systems and authors there are generating what must be millions of pages in over a dozen languages?
§ Dave: The one that puzzled me for accessibility was the images that did have alt tags but the alt tags were empty.
§ Allen: WOW… this has prompted me to check out my(USA) government’s sites and the budgets they have projected for them.
§ Mark: Well, this in unfortunate, but try to validate google – same result.
On the other hand – my own website needs to be validated – no time to fix it :) But European Parliament and Google should be able to affort real developers. Send them e-mails – yes! I’ve choosen USA :)
§ Martin: This seems to be the norm for major legislatures.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2FWelcome.shtml&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline
§ Small Paul: Is it me, or have they got opening tags and (sic) closing tags?

And what’s the tag anyway? Are they mixing their custom XML with XHTML? Surely that’s not the best idea?
§ Drew: Looks like the comments system zapped your tags, Paul, but yes, you betcha. If you can dream it up, they’ve got it.
§ Simsy: ok having be to the EU website a few times… all I have to say is its very ugly..
haven’t been there in awhile either as its not acessable to me as i now use firefox…

A lot of websites are like this catering only to Internet explorer and not firefox, mozilla etc

if we can get them out of the mentality of IE being the end all and be all of browers and try to get them all on standards then we would all be better off..
§ Glen Wallis: man, that is sad. font tags with classes? but i disagree with Dave’s comments about empty alt tags. i use empty alt tags all the time.
§ Skip Chris: A couple of naysayes don’t seem to realise that the complaints levelled at this site aren’t just validation issues… Truthfully, pleasing the validator isn’t always the Right Thing To Do (although I’ve no sympathy if you flout validation and end up shooting yourself in the foot a year down the line).

The problem with this website is it cost a fortune to build, and it’s dreadful in every concievable way – user experience, design, information architechture… AND its abuse of the standards.
§ Heike: I was lucky sending my notes by using their form (used Firefox on Mac, now waiting for their answer).
Anyway, as long as users (and clients!) don’t understand what web standards mean, only a few modern web developers will create accessible sites and valide code!
I’d wish modern browsers would inform users, if a visited site is valide or not, even better if all errors would clearly be displayed and layout-tables would become visible!
Could be funny and perhaps would help domain owners and web developers to make up their minds. ;-)
§ Alex McKee: You know this doesn’t suprise me in the slightest. As a long term vocal opponent of the EU (ie: eurosceptic) it only adds to my argument :D

Seriously though, they have millions to spend you would think they’d hire someone like Andy Clarke, or Jon Hicks or yourself Drew to try and ensure a website that worked AND looked the biz.

Alex
§ Nick Fitzsimons: @Small Paul: I assume you were trying to refer to the variety of weird tags with names like “content” and so forth. (Hmm, strange things the comment system does with entities; I’ll use () for tags…)

I may be wrong, but this kind of thing often happens when somebody who doesn’t understand XSLT writes XSLT. Something like:

(content)(p)Hello(/p)(/content)

will get output wholesale, rather than the contained elements being output. Just a guess at an underlying piece of shoddiness…

@Dave, on the empty alt attributes: there’s nothing wrong with them, as they’re used on images which are just for decoration; at least the images that have some significance have moderately meaningful alt text. (“Man trades cart of gold ingots for barrels of oil”, anyone?)

Of course, if they knew what they were doing, the purely decorative images would be handled with CSS. Then again, if they knew what they were doing, would they be working for a government?
§ das: das
§ Ashley Bowers: I agree I think they could have done alot better with this site and hired some profesionals.With the kind of money they put behind the site you would figure it would be atleast somewhat good, but looks like crap if you ask me.
§ Britney: Thanks for makingme laugh today! It is sad, but its another eminder how so many folks out there are using non compliant software to generate… too bad web creation makers seem more focused on frilly features than good compliant code… there ought to be a law…
§ Stephanie: Right on Ashley with the kinda of money they have to throw around I would expect something alot more professional and accessible.
§ Seth Kravitz:
I find it incredibly hard to beleive thats what their site looks like. Are they strictly going after accesibility, compliance, and standards so much that they forgot to design a site that pleasant to look at? Are those font tags in the code? Does anyone actually still use font tags?

I love the heavy use of javascript too. The icing on the cake.
§ katalog:
You know this doesn’t suprise me in the slightest. As a long term vocal opponent of the EU (ie: eurosceptic) it only adds to my argument :D

Seriously though, they have millions to spend you would think they’d hire someone like Andy Clarke, or Jon Hicks or yourself Drew to try and ensure a website that worked AND looked the biz.

All in the <head>