The minute I heard, on "Larry King Live," that Ross Perot was starting a new political party, I went online looking for its Web site. My favorite search engine (Open Text Web Index - Power Search at http://www.opentext .com:8080/omw-comp.html) rarely lets me down, but this time it came up short. I found sites for Ross Perot's United We Standers (http://www.uwsa.org/), I found a Draft Colin Powell site (http://206.65.84.96/), and I found various third-party sites (http://web.kaleida.com/). But no Independence/Reform Party site.
By now, this new party probably has a home page, but I note for the historians that as of late 1995, we have not yet reached the point where a new political party puts up a Web page before it holds a press conference.
Since I was already online and an election year is looming, an election year that promises to be more interesting than some recent ones, I decided to check out other political sites on the Web.
Bob Dole's people had just announced that they were putting up a Web site that they guaranteed would not be too busy. Shoot, I could have told them that. Still, in the spirit of research, I decided to check it out and fired up the Open Text search engine again.
Moments later, I was looking at the Bob Dole for President page at http://www.dole96.org:80/dole/.
I soon noticed that there was something odd about this page.
For one thing, it didn't seem properly respectful of the leader of the Senate. It said that Dole was "Against War (except when it's only sort of a war, like the Gulf Not-A-War, which he was for, even though he thinks Congress should have instigated it rather than Bush.)"
For another thing, a link purporting to give Dole's views on crime turned out to be a link to a Microsoft site. And for yet another thing, the subtle but attractive background image, I now realized, was a bunch of Dole Pineapple labels.
Checking more closely, I discovered that every use of the word "weenie," and there were several, was a link to a Pete Wilson for President page.
Following more links, I discovered that I was in a substantial web of bogus Presidential candidate Web pages, all very official looking, all pretty funny, and all without any explicit admission of authorship.
Wasn't this the kind of thing Nixon's dirty-tricks squad, the Committee to Re-elect the President, aka CREEP, specialized in? Are we now seeing dirty tricks on the Web?
Well, not at these sites anyway. Nobody but a Dittohead is going to be fooled into thinking that the bogus Bob Dole site is the real thing. This is good satire, but it is obviously satire.
The real dirty tricks on the Web are those sites that violate all principles of user-interface design, waste their visitors' time, waste Internet bandwidth, and put an apostrophe in "its" when it's not a contraction.
Okay, that last one is just one of my pet peeves.
But there are some painfully bad Web pages out there, and a few public-spirited souls have taken on the responsibility of exposing the most egregious violators of taste and netiquette on the World Wide Web. They don't actually do anything to reduce such bad pages, but they provide links to them for those of us who enjoy the pain of looking at bad Web pages. If you're into that sort of thing, check out:
Pat Paulsen, by the way, is alive and running, according to the Dead People Server. His campaign page is at http://www.amdest.com/Pat/pat.html.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
MikeSwaine@eworld.com
Copyright © 1995, Dr. Dobb's Journal