As I am a newbie, excuse my interruption. I believe good newspapers have a technique for>dealing with this. They tell the suspected fault to the blamed party and ask him to reply
> in a couple of days. If he does not give a satisfactory reply soon, the newspapers
> publish the defect and mention the fact that the blamed party was
> evasive or whatever.
Actually, you are quite right about this. To be fair, we havent given a chance to icicidirect.com yet to respond to the complaint. Sudev, have you filed a complaint yet to icicidirect.com yet, using their feedback form? I think you should send one, wait for seven days, and then it should be put up the site on the list.
If that is agreeable by others, I will remove ICICIDirect.com for now, and put them up again if they dont respond.
I think we should have a policy for two kinds of "offenses".
1. Where the website puts up explicit notice that the site will look-good/work only with IE. These can be put up on the list right away. These notices are tantamount to policy decisions. In some cases, even the choice of technology used is as good as a policy decision. e.g. dca.nic.in (directorate of company affairs) reportedly uses vbscript in their websites.
2. Where obvious programming incompetency, or mere laziness to test the site against non-IE browsers, cause a problem of accessibility. In these cases, we send them a notice and wait for a period of seven days for either an explanatory mail, or correction of the issue. Failing any of these, we simply put up the company on the list.
Apart from banks, it would be great if we go all out against government websites which have absolutely no business to discriminate against browsers. If possible, please report such websites offlist at (hallofshame -at- lug-delhi -dot- org). I will send them a notice myself and put them up if they fail to respond.
I hope people understand the significance of these actions.
Why would the Indian public use Linux as their primary desktop ever, if critical websites like banks and government information websites, make the Linux desktop absolutely useless? Why should we have to take refuge in actions like "fudging browser identification" to be able to access these websites, which is like trying to lie to websites about your true identity.
BTW technically, browser identification fudging mostly works if the website is actively blocking browsers by name. In most cases however the problem happens because the websites use proprietary extensions to web standards(like IE specific DOM in Javascript, or using VBScript instead of javascript or using IE specific HTML like in teh case of icicidirect.com). These problems cant be solved by juggling with browsers. (exception being I think Opera which can emulate IE *behavior* if asked).
Microsoft's desktop monopoly has ensured that almost every(90+%) new desktop or laptop sold in the world has IE on the desktop. Mozilla/Netscape represents choice for the consumers. And in the case of the Linux world, Mozilla represents the only option that users have for accessing websites.
Remember, one of the main resistance against the adoption of Linux is interoperability - in hardware, software, websites, internet access ... everything. You cant just push Linux down the throat of new users unless these issues are answered. And the only way this issue can be handled is by publicizing problems caused by providers of goods and services who make life difficult for Linux users.
- Sandip
-- Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home: http://www.sandipb.net
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