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October 17, 2004

Misuse of the English language

aka "lying"

via Glenn Reynolds comes this fun, little exercise in election incivility.

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - A fund-raising e-mail from a Democratic congressional candidate contained a hidden expletive directed at his opponent, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The expletive aimed at Republican Greg Walcher could be seen when recipients dragged their cursor over an image of John Salazar, who sent the e-mail to supporters Thursday seeking donations, The Denver Post reported.

Salazar and Walcher are competing to replace retiring GOP incumbent Scott McInnis in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District.

Salazar campaign manager Jim Merlino said the expletive was inadvertently inserted by a campaign staff member upset by negative attacks on Salazar by the Walcher campaign. Merlino said Salazar did not know about the insertion beforehand and was "extremely upset" to learn about it.[emphasis added]

Inadvertently? One cannot [accidently, unintentionally] insert an alt tag on an image via html.* That is a purposeful, intentional action.

Maybe the campaign staffer thought only Dems were getting the email and would get a chuckle, or a "right on!", from the cleverness. That this get notice outside of the circle of supporters was surely inadvertent, but not the creation of the tag.

Good Godfrey, man. Apologize for your staffer's stupidity and get on with it! If evil FoxNews can do it when one of their writer's parodies gets out where it shouldn't, what's up with you?

*Emails with embedded pics are created like most web pages with the markup language "HTML" (you can view this coding by going to your browser's view menu and clicking "source"). Once an image is embedded, through a tool or by handcoding, within the code that calls that picture one creates the tag that will display when a cursor is hovered over the picture by typing alt="your message here". Obviously, inserting such a tag cannot be "inadvertent."

Posted by Darleen at October 17, 2004 09:41 AM

Comments

Most definitely it can't be inadvertent. I do web programming for a living, and since we do websites for gov't agencies we're required to follow standards that include the use of alt. You have to manually determine the text that goes into these fields.

Posted by: Lola Lee at October 18, 2004 10:27 AM