CNN Fail: Counting to nine is hard

I went to CNN today and clicked on a link about something or other. Since CNN loves to repurpose its content, this turned out to be a video, but not one I was allowed to watch. I got this bizarre message (click it to see the whole page):

Now, I am not a mathematician, although I did get the lower school math prize at the end of fifth grade. And, given that esteemed credential, I am pretty sure that “Flash Player 9″ falls well within the set “Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher.”

Should we really believe that CNN can’t count? Or that the Javascript responsible cannot perform a “greater than or equal to” test successfully? Nope.

I use a Firefox plugin called FlashBlock to keep from loading every damn piece of SWF crud people see fit to put on their web pages. If I want to see something, I can still see it, but I get to decide before gumming up my processor and browser.

On most web sites, this causes no problem, but CNN tried to be clever and that is where they failed. They test to see if the Flash object is up and running, rather than just checking to see if I have a Flash installed. Since FlashBlock stops it from running until I say it should run, their code freaks out and complains. All of which might have been okay if it complained about the write thing, but the eager beaver coder who cobbled this together apparenly felt that the only way that Flash wouldn’t run would be if it wasn’t installed. And that lead to the inane message.

So what lesson can we take away from this? Make your error and warning messages meaningful and correct. Report what happened, not what you think happened. I realize that CNN was just trying to make the message non-scary for the average user, but “We couldn’t start the video. Perhaps there is a problem with your Flash player.” would have been non-scary and would have saved me the trouble of trying to guess why CNN’s site couldn’t count to nine.

As the saying goes: say what you mean or you will never mean what you say.