MSNBC blunders over poll position theregister.co.uk
On that curious subject, an entertaining bit from The Register:
Netscape users found they could not vote because the voting buttons, which appeared fleetingly, did not render properly. Debate centred around whether this was deliberate, since denying voting to Netscape users would most likely bias the result towards Microsoft, or whether it was just incompetent. It was soon flushed out that the problem was with Netscape's buggy way of dealing with cascading style sheets. The Opera browser (which is as near standard as you can get in a browser) did render the questionnaire correctly, as did Mozilla M10 but not KDF. This begs the question as to whether MSNBC knew that Netscape had a problem in this area, which was exploited, or again, was just technically incompetent. It was noteworthy that the site proclaims that it is "optimised for IE and Windows Media Player" and is maintained by MSNBC Interactive News, One Microsoft Way, Fort Redmond. The problem was reported to MSNBC, and suddenly the applet was fixed for Netscape with Windows.
Brock Meeks, the chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC, claimed after the bug had been fixed that the site did work for Windows and Netscape, but did not admit to the problem. He did admit however that it was impossible for Mac users to vote -- whether they used IE or Navigator.
Cheers, Dan. |
