Rluggers, Not too long ago, I got an e-mail from the UNR System Admin list saying that there was a "new policy" in regards to what browsers the University would support. Curious to see what the college I hold at least one degree from, and may one day contribute money to, would standardize their platform on, I read the policy -- and was appalled:
http://computing.unr.edu/FAQs/Policies/BrowserPolicy.html As a concerned alumni, I questioned this policy: -- From: Mark C Ballew [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Posted At: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 2:45 PM Posted To: Help Conversation: UNR Internet Browser Policy Subject: UNR Internet Browser Policy Help desk, According to http://computing.unr.edu/FAQs/Policies/BrowserPolicy.html, only IE and MacOS's Safari as supported. Where does that leave Linux/Unix users? There isn't IE available for Linux (nor will there ever be). How come Mozilla 1.4 or Firebird 0.6 aren't supported? They often render pages better than IE. Mark -- The reply I got wasn't so clear: [Mark], the policy, as initially announced, was ambiguous and we are rewriting it. This was not a policy for departmental operations. This was a policy that we had to move to due to the demands of some of the web site features, including support for section 508 (ADA, etc.). For example, we simply could not continue to support all of the legacy software of the University home page. The principle is that the web site can best be viewed with X software. That does not negate he use of other software, but we simply can't keep everything at the lowest common denominator...our applications, which we do not build in-house, are not allowing us to do this. Also, some of our emerging administrative applications demand the use of later versions of browsers...once again, in some cases, these matters are largely out of our hands. When the policy has been refined, we will post a follow-up announcement in the News section of the Campus Computing web site: computing.unr.edu. -- Not satisfied with the answer, I replied: Harry, My main concern with the policy is that an entire segment of users that would otherwise be interested in the computing programs (CS, EE, CIS) would be locked out if the main page and 3rd party applications wouldn't view pages from open source projects, such as Mozilla. I've already hit a few snags with univeristy pages using flash or shockwave; those plug-ins simply aren't supported. On the other hand, if a 3rd party web application supports MacOS's Safari, then Mozilla should work, since they both use the Open Source KHTML rendering engine. I'd be curious if there was a policy in place to make sure that future 3rd party web applications did work with most modern browsers, or at least could be easily modified or enhanced be in-house web developers. I completely understand wanting to get rid of legacy browsers (NS4.x, IE4.x, etc). I will keep an eye out for the updated policy. Thanks for your reply Harry! Mark -- I'm posting this to rlug because often I find myself locked out of certain pages, and I'm sure other Linux users have hit a similar road block. We can't get in because the browser can't render it, but because the web site checks for a user agent. We could lie about the UA, but then the site's statistics wouldn't show that we are running Mozilla/Firebird/Opera. 1.6% of the web uses mozilla, and that is quite a few people (http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox23.html). What do you guys and gals think? Mark -- Mark C. Ballew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sublinear.net _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
