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

From the page source

[jholder]

Which you CAN read with Mozilla"

Re:From the page source

[Dredd13]

I wonder if that's a standard formmail.pl complete with the exploitability for spamming?

Re:One more indication...

[clonebarkins]

By the way, I just sent the following message to the Honorable Tubbs:

On behalf of the Slashdot community (http://www.slashdot.org), I think it's despicable that you require your constituents to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to contact you via the web. There are several other browsers available, all of which are better than IE.

I just have one question for you -- how much was the last check Bill Gates sent you?

One interesting tidbit is that it's required that you indicate whether or not you are a registered voter. Guess that makes it easy to sort the wheat from the chaff....

Re:mal-formed html

[clonebarkins]

It doesn't work in IE either. So much for the extraneous marketing attempt.

Try Opera

[reddog1]

Opera IMO works better then mozilla and has an option to identify itself as MSIE. Normally when I find a site that requires IE I flip opera to identify as IE and it all works :-) Awesome Browser

"Congress Woman Tubbs-Jones office please hold"

[Hungus]

I am writing this while on hold with I was answered politely but the receptionist who politely put me on hold for the person who could answer the question of why i needed Internet Explorer to email Ms Tubbs-Jones. Ms Sheila Harvey answered and then asked for my personal information and they "appreciated me bringing this to their attention" They are going to look into this and call me back I will post the results of this call as soon as they call me back as a reply to this message. It was suggested I fax them or send them postal mail ... where i pointed this out on teh page ... "**NOTICE: Due to recent anthrax cases, mail delivery to the Washington office has stopped indefinitely. Please utilize e-mail, fax, and phone when possible to ensure timely receipt and response." Interestingly ( or not so much so) her page was created by frontpage 5 and the charset is of course windows-1252. There is no doctype or anything else to make this page apply to any normal standard. - more when i get called back.

grrr....

[darkpurpleblob]

In order to send an e-mail to Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones, please complete this form using the Internet Explorer browser.

Why does it say 'in order to send e-mail'? If I cannot see the email address that I am sending my message to, and I am not using the program/site that I use to send and recieve email then I am clearly not sending email. Sure, it may be sent as an email message eventually from the server that receives the form submission, but this is totally hidden to me as a user.

It really should say 'In order to send a message to Congresswoman...'

Re:Need some priorities

[arkane1234]

When you have 90~95% of people using IE, why should your congress(wo)man have her staff spend their time testing the site with every freeware/OSS/weirdo browser.

If there aren't many people using these "wierd" browsers, then there isn't much to worry about now is there? I think contrary to your belief, the world uses more than IE. I seriously doubt that 90% of the world uses IE, as evidenced by the use of Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, and other browsers.

Aside from that, they all share one thing: standards. Don't follow them, and well... you don't have any credibility in this world as a tech worker. I don't care if you call them MS extensions or not, if you are offering a public service as a government worker you need to use standards so that the entire country can use it, not just your IE constituents.

There's no reason she should even take comments through an online form. There are many other channels, that worked perfectly well for hundreds of years before the internet to contact your elected officials. So really, be thankful there is any online form at all, and, if you really don't like it, write a letter :)

Oh please, stop with the elitist mentality.
Any measure of communication is sufficient, and it is the job of our government personnel to use the channels of communication to stay open to the constituents.
The only reason regular postal mail is more prevalant currently is because mail has been around longer than the Internet. I'm sure 30-40 years this thought pattern will be extinct... thank god.