Write Your Congressman -- If You Use IE

inonit writes "Well, geez -- after all this US election talk, I got inspired to write my congresswoman. But as a good Slashdotter, imagine my irritation when I found the following note in the "Contact" section: 'In order to send an e-mail to Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones, please complete this form using the Internet Explorer browser. If the Internet Explorer browser is not available, please mail your correspondence to the listed postal mailing address above.' I don't really have the time to check all 435 Congressional sites to see if this is widespread, but it gives me some insight into why all those <sarcasm>foreigners</sarcasm> are complaining about having their governments be beholden to U.S. technology companies. Can someone running IE write my congressperson and ask her to let me write her? Does she only accept phone calls from AT&T customers?" I just tried filling out the form with Mozilla, and ended up at a page notifying me of a search error. (Huh?)

Comments

mal-formed html

[HyperbolicParabaloid]

Submitting the form in Mozilla fails because there is a Search form earlier in the page, but that form is never closed. The submit button at the bottom of the email form is in a different form, but since the first one was never closed, the browser submits the FIRST form.
If the form were closed properly, I bet this would work fine in ANY browser.

at least you can get her address

[qengho]

My rep (Wolf/Virginia) says this on his contact page:

I participate in the "Write Your Representative" program of the House of Representatives so that I can more effectively respond to the needs and concerns of the people of the 10th District. A public e-mail address does not provide a way to ensure that 10th District residents get priority in reaching me over the Internet. Please click on the icon below to e-mail me through the "Write Your Representative" program.

Whatever. He has a link to a generic form that seems browser-agnostic and uses a numeric code instead of an email address in the hidden fields.

They can't even go by their own laws...

[reaper20]

Section 508:

(n) When electronic forms are designed to be completed on-line, the form shall allow people using assistive technology to access the information, field elements, and functionality required for completion and submission of the form, including all directions and cues.

Who wants to bet this page won't pass this requirement? I'm wondering if the user's assistive technology warns them to use IE. :)

It's been a law for a few years now, for government pages.

Phoenix

[RedWolves2]

Use Phoenix then you can set you useragent type to IE.

house.gov/writerep/ works fine

[stefanlasiewski]

When I try to write my Representative, I am directed to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
which works fine with Mozilla.

No funny IE tags, no funny forms, just a classic, simple webform.

Generic House Email Form

[n-baxley]

There is a generic email form for all house members. It doesn't say anything about needing a certain browser and I'm pretty sure that I've emailed my congress critter through this form several times.

Her page is broken

[dacarr]

What the subject says. You can't find search terms if you try to write her.

Go to the house.gov link above the statement and contact her that way.

Her site is busted

[babbage]

I just tried to send her this but couldn't. Yay, using Slash as a stand in for participatory democracy:

As a technology professional and, based on someone who I think would agree with most of your political stances (that is, I'm want to be nice about this), please have your website amended by a qualified professional. The form used to send this message has a couple of problems that really ought to be addressed:

• There is no good reason for a web form such as this to force visitors to use a particular kind of browser software to access it. In spite of the recent court decision t hat would suggest otherwise, Microsoft has been tried & convicted as an abusive monopolist, and if visitors take the initiative to use alternative software they should be applauded, not excluded. Keeping out users based on their commercial choices seems very anti-democratic to me.

• Skimming the HTML source of this form, I note that it includes hidden fields for "mailto" and "url". That is a very bad sign, because there are well known security problems with certain freely available web form processing programs that are widely used on the web today, and one of the signatures of these dangerously broken programs is that they allow users to set fields like this. The reason that is a problem is that it allows a malicious user to send false data to your program, and by so doing hijack it & do anything from send out spam mail to carry out certain forms of identify theft or defamation of character. Rather than allowing the user to set this data in the web form, you would be much better off by moving that data into your server script instead. Your tech staff will hopefully know how to do this; if not I would be happy to answer any questions. To give a couple of reference URLs, I offer:
• http://www.securityfocus.com/corporate/research/to p10attacks_q1_2002.shtml
• http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/faq_nms.html#But%20 there%20are%20perfectly%20good%20programs%20alread y%20out%20there%2C%20why%20bother%3F
• http://www.scriptarchive.com/nms.html
• http://www.google.com/search?q=formmail+security+c gi

Thank you for your attention, and for God's sake keep voting against Bush's war against Iraq. I'm sure history will prove that you were right to oppose this. Your speech against it, at http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones/pr021009.htm, was wonderful. Thank you.

Hey, it got written up, it might as well get posted somewhere. Maybe her staff will decide to start reading Slashdot today...

One stop representative shop

[bignendian]

Http://www.congress.org allows you to use one form to send email to all of your senators and representatives and the president. They seem to have worked their way into the webforms too.

Re:One more indication...that YOU are an idiot

[rm -f DMCA]

And... just because some "flock of narrow-minded OS zealots" says something's good, it must really be bad? After all, enthusiasm itself is a bad thing, right? I agree that many times people blatantly bash non-OSS products just because source code wasn't included, but have you (Coward) ever tried a different browser? Or are you too narrow-minded to try out other products?

So, IE is better because it does not include tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management, selective/smart/total pop-up ad blocking, mouse gestures, customizable default stylesheets, different themes, image loop control, smaller memory footprint, faster rendering (in many cases), and many other features?

I refer you to (available in Windows and Linux):
Phoenix
Mozilla
Opera (by the way, proprietary, but good just the same)

Re:From the page source

[frankie]

Actually it's just a broken form entirely. The other relevant line is: form method="post" action= "http://www.house.gov/htbin/formproc/tubbsjones/ht _contact1.txt &display=/tubbsjones/contact_thanks.htm" But house.gov returns a 404 error at that address.