[PLUG-TALK] There Oughta' Be A Law
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
Tue Mar 1 19:05:03 UTC 2011
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, Rich Shepard wrote:
> There ought to be a law that requires government Web sites, at all
> levels of government, to be usable by _any_ friggin' Web browser,
> not just Internet Exploder. So far I've discovered that Multnomah
> County's Assessors Office maps (or is that via Metro?) are no longer
> firefox-accessible but require bending over to Microsoft by using
> their software. Same with the US Geological Survey's National
> Hydrographic Dataset.
>
> If public tax money is used to develop and maintain these sites they
> should be available to all, and not just to those paying for
> proprietary OSes and browsers. Yes, sometimes Opera works, but such
> restrictions are just plain wrong.
I agree with the premise of your complaint, but I'd add the caveat the
the test NOT be usability by a certain number of browsers (what about
Mozilla 2 or lynx 0.65?) but by meeting standards.
That is, public sites ought to be developed against an explicit
standard, e.g., HTML 4.
Otherwise, the tail (browser) wags the dog.
--
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/
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