December 6, 2002
As many of you know, I used to live in central Florida. Living in the area, and enjoying the types of music I enjoy, much of my radio time was spent on Tampa Bay's bigtime station, 93.3 FLZ. (The station was known as "The Power Pig" when I had first moved to the area.)
The station was decent enough, playing a fairly good selection of music that I enjoyed. However, there was also "The MJ & BJ Morning Show" which I listened to nearly every morning as I found myself getting ready for school. It was entertaining and funny, and I was a listener long after I graduated high school, finding myself on early-morning drives to my college in Tampa.
A few years later, I moved to Atlanta. Earlier this year, I was interested to find out that the morning show (renamed as the "MJ Morning Show"; BJ vanished, and I don't know why) had gained a local affiliate in the Atlanta area. Pretty neat, as I could still listen to the show even after moving out of the Tampa area. As an added bonus, the affiliate happens to be a station on which my radio has been rigidly set since close to the station's inception, as they play a fantastic selection of 80s hit music.
Funny show, entertaining news, great station otherwise. So what's the problem?
Their website.
I'm a big proponent of web standards, as well as clean design, and that site fails on both counts - choking miserably on the former. A look at the page's source reveals such a horrible mess of pseudo-HTML, it's painful to even attempt parsing it mentally. (Not only that, it's actually painful in some cases to attempt parsing it electronically, as it crashed the browser of a friend of mine when I attempted to show it to him.)
Indeed, many of the mistakes made are the result of either laziness, ignorance, or both. Now don't mistake ignorance for stupidity, however, as I don't view the people behind the show (or stations) as stupid by any means. It's just that whoever handles their respective websites doesn't have the slightest idea how to properly create clean, usable websites. Simple, yet damaging mistakes like not including file extensions on images (click here to see how these images appear in some browsers), improper use of tags (I found multiple <html> and <body> tags scattered throughout the document, some even appearing inside table elements), abuse of symbols (check out the number of instances of ), and generally unreadable markup.
Of course, many browsers can deal with the messy code and render the page as best it can. However, as I mentioned earlier, some browsers simply can't deal with the bad signal-to-noise ratio, and they literally crash when trying to display the site. Simply put, the MJ Morning Show website is the perfect example of "standards defiance". If you attempt to run the site through the w3c validator, it will complain that it can't validate the page because it cannot determine what type of HTML document it's supposed to be. If you force it to assume HTML 4.01 Transitional, you will get a list of over 500 errors on the front page alone. If you force the assumption of HTML 2.0, a standard more than seven years old, you'll get well over 700 errors on the same document.
The point is, you can't expect your web presence to be taken seriously if you refuse to take the technology (and its proper usage) into consideration. By no means is the MJ Morning Show's website the only website that doesn't resemble anything close to web standards, but the lack of interest in even examining the problem says a lot, too. I've e-mailed the show (as well as "Clear Channel Radio Interactive Support") several times, and have received no reply at all. Some of the messages I sent actually spoke positive about the show, and provided information with regard to topics they were discussing on the air - not even mentioning the website, and still were not granted a reply. I understand they receive a lot of mail, so I'm not too annoyed by the lack of responses on that front.
It's irritating being conflicted between something for which I have tremendous respect on the radio, while losing nearly all respect for the same entity on the internet.
(08:04)
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