Todd Walton wrote:
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:56:48 -0800, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Feb 10, 2005, at 10:37 AM, Todd Walton wrote:
Neither of those plausible explanations involves the word "spite" or
"_dare_", and I can't imagine what facts are at your disposal that
would justify such a subjective opinion.
Sheesh, do I need to smiley everything? Most of that was hyperbole.
Oh yeah... Me too. What, I have to tell you I'm joking? My words
didn't show it?
And, really, I haven't come across a web site yet that Safari, or
FireFox (my fall-back browser) couldn't adequately handle.
Argh. I have. Southwest Airlines sent out a link in it's newsletter
to a free movie. The website was Movielink which doesn't even show
you its front page if you're not running Internet Explorer. Also,
there was a website somebody sent to the list the other day that I had
trouble getting to load with Firefox. My school, Grossmont College,
uses an .exe file to show financial aid data. If you go to the
school's website and click through to check your financial aid data it
tries to load an .exe and Firefox and Mozilla just say "Where do you
want to save this file?". In Internet Explorer, of course, it loads
right up and shows what financial aid I've received. (What is it,
ASP? I've never even heard of .exe-loading in IE.) There's
absolutely no interactivity in the thing beyond buttons. It could all
be handled with HTML over secured HTTP. Oh, and also school
demographic data is viewable IE-only.
It uses ActiveX I would bet.
My school did the same kind of thing - IE only student web site. I (and others)
complained and they finally changed it. For months I told the school that if
they did not fix it so that I could take my pre-assessments without IE, I would
simply take my money elsewhere. I did the same with some of the online
assignments they required for some classes. In all cases (fortunately for me,
the school, and other students) the school either fixed the issues or (in the
case of assignments) relaxed the requirements when things didn't work.
I will not subject *my* system to someone else's crap just for their
convenience or because they can't hire someone who knows something other than a
single technology. My data is more important to me than that, even if theirs
isn't important to them.
I have a Lan-like reaction to these kinds of things. I can actually
feel the physical stress it causes. Sites that refuse to do anything
without *cookies* are actually a lot more common, though, in my
experience. (Netflix, for example.)
If I was paying all this money for school out of my pocket, I would exceed
Lan's reaction by a factor of ten at the very least.
Sites that won't work without pop-ups (Gmail) are fortunately rare.
Gmail fixed this problem a couple of weeks ago.
It's frustrating trying to get people to understand why adhering to
protocol standards is important on the Internet. (HTML, decent
English, filetypes. "Everyone will know what I mean.")
I am thankful that I've had several instructors in the past year that have
strongly advised the students to adhere to open standards and not proprietary
ones. There are some students that refused the advise, by I think there are
many more that actually learned the whys and wherefores of the standards.
Paul G. "I just noticed my server is off and my sig is not appearing because of
it" Allen
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