Apologies but did not make as much progress on the Congressional Roll Call vote as I had hoped.
I did find some interesting information about the vote.xsl stylesheet and manage to use color to code members of the House.
You probably remember me whining about how hard it is to tell between roman and italics to distinguish members of different parties. Jazzing Up Roll Call Votes For Fun and Profit (XQuery)
The XSLT code is worse than I imagined.
Here’s what I mean:
<b><center><font size=”+2″>FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL <xsl:value-of select=”/rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/rollcall-num”/>
<xsl:if test=”/rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/vote-correction[text()!=”]”>*</xsl:if></font></center></b>
<!– <xsl:if test = “/rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/majority[text() = ‘D’]”> –>
<xsl:if test = “$Majority=’D'”>
<center>(Democrats in roman; Republicans in <i>italic</i>; Independents <u>underlined</u>)</center><br/>
</xsl:if>
<!– <xsl:if test = “/rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/majority[text() = ‘R’]”> –>
<xsl:if test = “$Majority!=’D'”>
<center>(Republicans in roman; Democrats in <i>italic</i>; Independents <u>underlined</u>)</center><br/>
</xsl:if>
Which party is in the majority determines whether the names in a party appear in roman or italic face font.
Now there’s a distinction that will be lost on a casual reader!
What’s more, if you are trying to reform the stylesheet, don’t look for R or D but again for majority party:
<xsl:template match=”vote”>
<!– Handles formatting of Member names based on party. –>
<!– <xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party=’R'”><xsl:value-of select=”../legislator”/></xsl:if>
<xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party=’D'”><i><xsl:value-of select=”../legislator”/></i></xsl:if> –>
<xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party=’I'”><u><xsl:value-of select=”../legislator”/></u></xsl:if>
<xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party!=’I'”>
<xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party = $Majority”><!– /rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/majority/text()”> –>
<xsl:value-of select=”../legislator”/>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test=”../legislator/@party != $Majority”><!– /rollcall-vote/vote-metadata/majority/text()”> –>
<i><xsl:value-of select=”../legislator”/></i>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
As you can see, selecting by party has been commented out in favor of the roman/italic distinction based on the majority party.
I wanted to label the Republicans with an icon but my GIMP skills don’t extend to making an icon of young mothers throwing their children under the carriage wheels of the wealthy to save them from a live of poverty and degradation. A bit much to get into a HTML button sized icon.
I settled for using the traditional red for Republicans and blue for Republicans and ran the modified stylesheet against roll705.xml locally.
Here is FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 705 as HTML.
Question: Are red and blue easier to distinguish than roman and italic?
If your answer is yes, why resort to typographic subtlety on something like party affiliation?
Are subtle distinctions used to confuse the uninitiated and unwary?