Re: [libreoffice-users] There goes Open-Source in the White House

Hi

On Sun, 2011-08-07 at 06:42 -0400, webmaster for Kracked Press
Productions wrote: 

> On 08/07/2011 04:16 AM, Stan Goodman wrote:
> > On 08/07/2011 06:05 AM, soumalya ray wrote:
> > > not only US govt;even indian govt organisations forces users to use MS
> > > product.though obviously US is a much bigger cat.
> > > for example,during my post-graduate entrance exam form filling up,the 
> > > site (
> > > www.aiimsexams.org) told me that only IE is allowed,nothing else.
> > > so i used the useragent changer add-on in firefox and completed the
> > > form!!!!!!!!!!!!
> > > my question is simple-when firefox able to fill up the form with the
> > > add-on,why are they forcing us to use IE?????i mailed them but nobody
> > > replied.
> >
> > It could have been much worse. The designer of the form could just as 
> > well have used MS-specific coding that would have made it impossible 
> > to use any browser other than IE, thus insuring that only Windows 
> > users could be accepted into the post-graduate program while Linus 
> > users (members of a lower caste) would be excluded. Count your blessings.
> >
> > The reason nobody replied to you is that they think you are a crank or 
> > madman.
> My question is why would a designer use MS-specific coding?
>
> I remember being told that people should never design a site that 
> requires the user to use one browser over another.  You must test out 
> your site to make sure it runs on several browsers to make it 
> readable/usable to everyone.
>
> That designer must have used software that creates IE specific code 
> results.  They still exist, but I sure would not use one.  If he/she 
> wrote the form in a specific scripting language, like Javascript, Perl, 
> PHP, etc., then there should be no reason to create an IE specific 
> coding for the form site.
>
> Firefox has a large market share, 10-15%.  Then there is Mac users.  
> There is about 10%, as I have read, of college users using the Mac.  IE 
> only would stop those users from filling out that form, along with the 
> Linux users.  This is a problem and the designer should have not caused it.
>
> Yes there is an IE simulator add-on for Firefox, but how many people 
> know about it?  I forgot about it till it was brought up.
>
> I wonder if the designer was a MS fan and did not want any non-MS person 
> to have an easy time filling out this required form?

Depending the code generation program the designer used you could easily
generate such poor code that it may only run reliably on specific
browsers or worse yet specific versions. One cause of this problem is
each browser will "correct" different coding errors so buggy code may
run on IE and Chrome and die miserably on Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
And because the code is possibly so poorly done it can be nightmare to
fix particularly if your skills are poor.

I have working on a web page and had to scrap the code a program wrote
because it was so poor that it was difficult to follow and correct. I
rewrote the code and so far it runs on several different browsers. When
I tested the original code there were about 40 html errors per page even
though it displayed on some browsers and I did not test it for standards
compliance.

MS is trying to kill IE6 but because idiots wrote code that require
specific quirks that are only in IE6 some companies are finding it
expensive to even migrate to other versions of IE. The irony is that it
is to validate your code through W3C.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com

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