Hi, I'm starting my first year at TAU (Tel Aviv University) this year. I recently got mail regarding my faculty's website, that it contains vital information etc. etc. I was not particularly surprised to see that the website is: A. Horrible - Has a weird green border around the page (what happened to plain HTML?). B. IE specific - Mozilla displays it reasonably (presumably in broken mode), but Opera does not. Needless to say it does not pass the W3C HTML validator. C. Huge - I'm assuming they are trying to avoid Hebrew problems by using images. The page http://www.tau.ac.il/lifesci/students/sec.html is about 600K. It takes 1-2 minutes to load it Over my ISDN connection.
Also, critical information (class schedule) is only available in MS Word format, which is not displayed properly (the actual document, not the format) under OpenOffice, AbiWord or even WordPad. My questions are: 1. Is there any point in trying to fight this? If so, how? 2. Is there an alternative I can offer? Is there at all such a thing as HTML compliant Hebrew webpage which is displayed properly by all browsers? Is there a format which can contain Hebrew and is supported by various applications on multiple platforms? 3. Are the recent developments in getting the Israeli government to make information available in open formats relevant here? I believe TAU is a state University - shouldn't (don't?) they have to be compliant with that initiative? 4. What options do I personally have? I *do* need access to that information but I do not have MS Office and have no intention of either pirating or buying it (or installing it on my computer, even if I had a license). I'm also planning to move completely to Linux pretty soon, which would make running Word an impossibility. Thanks, Alexander Maryanovsky. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
