Saturday, August 20, 2011

Why you cannot give Feedback to the LS?

The recent Anna Hazare movement has been opposed by many. Intellectuals like Nandan Nilekani among many others wanted the use better ways to comment or provide feedback to the parliament.

I wonder if Mr Nilekani has ever tried using the feedback form on the parliament of India website. The website which is designed and hosted by National Informatics Centre has a very interesting feature indeed :)

It has excellent code which makes sure that feedback can never be submitted. If you don't believe me you can try it yourself. As soon as you type anything in the feedback form the javascript onkey event calls the validate function. This function is supposed to replace all special characters. However, the brilliant person who designed this included the ^ (caret) character in the "myC" array that lists all special characters. This results in all possible characters being matched by the Regular expression. Hence, anything thats typed into the feedback form gets deleted.

If this is the situation in a website that can be easily verified by anybody with access to the internet. We can only imagine what happens to the feedback which actually manages to reach the Politicians after manging to escape the caret.