While I do have very distinct political views and opinions probably stemming from my undergraduate political science background, I try to keep them from influencing my blogging preferring to keep my focus intellectually and technologically focused. However, ever now and then I come across something too good to pass up that allows me to talk about politics from a completely intellectual and/or technology-related perspective. This is one of those occasions.

My co-workers and I were discussing the Democratic National Convention and the closing event held last night one topic that arose was who John McCain would select as his running mate. For one reason or another we ended up going out to McCain’s website and we noticed something interesting (at least for a bunch of web application developers) and it’s a true study in contrast. If you take a look at McCain’s site in IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 you will notice a pretty extreme contrast, especially when compared to Barack Obama’s First, here are screenshots (from today) comparing the two sites in the two different browsers both running on my Windows XP machine.

First in Firefox 3.0.1

Obama - Firefox 3.0.1 - Resized

McCain - FF3 - Resized

Now in IE7

Obama - IE - Thumbnail

McCain - IE7 - Resized

Notice how poorly McCain’s site renders in Firefox?

So what does all this tell you about the two candidates? Maybe something, maybe nothing. For me it tells me that Barack Obama has more astute developers who made sure that his site was usable and visually appealing to users on all platforms and all browsers. McCain’s not so much. Upon looking more closely at the two sites I also noticed that Obama’s site is written in PHP and MySql (both open source technologies) while McCain’s is written in Microsoft’s .NET (hence the .aspx extensions). The lack of support for open source technology by McCain and the use of it by Obama makes me think that one candidate is simply more in touch with technology (and probably has better technologists on his campaign staff).

So while this is a totally random and not related to anything scientific or definitive I think it is a perfect study in contrasts for our Presidential contenders. What other lessons can we glean from this? Especially from an association technology perspective?