mrm design blog

A Hung Parliament - What does this mean for us?

All this talk of a hung parliament got me wondering what it was all about and what it could mean for all of us. A quick check on Wikipedia came up with this below:

In parliamentary systems, a hung parliament is one in which no political party has an outright majority of seats. This situation is normal in many legislatures with proportional representation such as the parliaments of Germany, the Republic of Ireland and Italy, or in legislatures with strong regional parties; in such legislatures the term 'hung parliament' is rarely used. However in nations in which single member districts are used to elect parliament, and there are weak regional parties, such as the United Kingdom, a hung parliament is a rarity, as in these circumstances one party will usually hold enough seats to form a majority. A hung parliament will usually force either a coalition government, a minority government or a dissolution of parliament. Frequent hung parliaments can result in smaller parties staying in power for decades as they switch support between the two or three major parties (this is what occurred with the Free Democratic Party in Germany).

Smells like real democracy to me

There is even a page dedicated to Hanging Parliment and what it could mean for all of us. Check it out here.

The useful graph from the Telegraph above shows the likelyhood of a hung parliament (check the betfair predicts tab)

The first entry in to a new blog should be about something important, right?

In the world of web design, you can often come into contact with various annoyance's which the everyday human may not be aware of.

The one that tends to give the most nightmares is definitely browser compatibility.

More often than not, you can find yourself designing a B.E.A.utiful website with loads of fabulous images, gadgets and flashiness only to find that it looks wrong or doesn't work properly in a certain browser. (Cough, InternetExplorer, iPhoneSafari, cough, cough!)

So what exactly can be done about this?

The best thing you can do as a designer to enable your clients get the best possible browsing experience is regularly check the progress of your new baby using various tools such as browsershots and design your sites to work in all browsers with images substituting flash (cheers apple), png fixes (thanks microsoft) and custom css wizardry....

But, why can't we just get the whole world to start using firefox instead!*

The highly gorgeous and user friendly fox gives me zero problems when designing and it handles all of my sites flawlessly. It is my browser of choice.

Click on the image below to find out about firefox and why you and your customers should be using it and while your at it check out the plugins page for all the highly useful web development tools :

*At this current moment in time you can't get firefox on your iPhone without a little bit of work but who knows what the future will bring!

Happy Browsing People

Marc

10.03.10