Dublin City University’s President’s Welcome Page Web Globalization Report Card: “Must Try Harder.” And hey, where’s that Polish flag?!

I attended DCU (Dublin City University) for a semester. Have you noticed the “President’s Welcome” page on the college’s web site? Is it just me who really finds something wrong in this day and age with the “Chinese” and “Arab” sections? The wrong renderings, the gif representation of Chinese and Japanese text, those “flags” (with the ALT text of “Chinese” and “Arab League”), the non-Unicode character set, the wrong directional rendering, the missing DIR tag, the LANG tags set to “en”…. ? AAAAAAAGH!

Whatever about the lousy awareness of basic web globalization that this page reveals, at a time when college-level IT education in Ireland finds it hard to attract students (applications down) and when 10% of the Irish population is what is snottily termed “non-national” (as offensive a term as the German Gastarbeiter), it’s clear that educational institutions like DCU need to take a closer look at what kind of message they’re sending and to what audience.

E-mail me and let me know your thoughts!