Buried in Jeb Bush Website, a ‘Die Hard’ Surprise

For an hour or so this afternoon, buried in the source code of Jeb Bush’s website were several paragraphs summarizing the plot of the “Die Hard” movie franchise.

Seems like an odd thing to include in the JS of your presidential announcement page. https://t.co/bA8DeSzeyk pic.twitter.com/vwfUbBLt0M

— Jeremy Bowers (@jeremybowers) June 15, 2015

Besides spoiling the “Die Hard” movies for people who haven’t seen them, the inclusion of the scripting files — something of a joke among the campaign’s programmers — does nothing to compromise the function of Mr. Bush’s website.

But source code of candidate websites has been an interesting place to browse so far this cycle.

The source code of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s site features an ASCII-art version of her campaign logo, and the page source for Rand Paul’s site includes a pitch to join the campaign’s tech team.

(Hiding messages in a site’s HTML files isn’t an uncommon practice. Even the Times includes a recruiting message in the source code of many of its pages.)

So, when browsing campaign websites, don’t forget to look under the hood. You just might find something that surprises you.