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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?)
...that Micro$oft has our Government in its pockets...
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Which you CAN read with Mozilla"
-- John
a million teenagers calling her offices at 3pm...
I feel for the receptionist
I live in a giant bucket.
So, I guess snailmail isn't even an option!!
-Derek
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.
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
My rep (Wolf/Virginia) says this on his contact page:
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.
My message was thus: "It is pathetic that you require Internet Explorer to submit e-mail messages. Aren't you aware the Microsoft is a convicted monopolist? The Internet runs on open protocols. Your eMail should be the same." I clicked submit, and even with IE I got an error message: "No records found with Please enter another Search Phrase." Looks like a paper cert is employed in the halls of congress...
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.
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
Hmmm. I guess now you know who not to vote for in the next election...
Use Phoenix then you can set you useragent type to IE.
Perhaps the web page in question is intentionally broken in order to avoid overloading the staff.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Many federal laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act, the OSHA laws, to name a few, explicitly exempt the US congress and their staff. :)
Congress doesn't have to follow that law... because Congress passed a law that says so
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.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
And MS gives most of their money to Republicans, too...
May we never see th
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.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Why, *every* self-respecting contituient downloads WINE, installs it, downloads IE, installs that in WINE (doing whatever hacking is necessary to get it to work), and then uses that to contact their representative. They aren't forcing you to buy the products of the (by far) largest donor of government funds from the tech industry at all! They certainly aren't trying to quell the voices of the people that oppose it.
May we never see th
Weird, I know. Must be the admin assistant. Then again, maybe H4xx0r3d.
-- John
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.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Making an association between an middle eastern sounding name and a terrorist organization clearly demonstates not only your depth of ignorance but also your biggotry.
... I sent an email to the webmaster (really content manager, as she had to consult the "techs") of my rep's (Robert Wexler, whom I have greatly tormented over his support of the P2P hacking bill and other idiotic anti-consumer, anti-tech legislation) site about a bug that made it only viewable in IE. She was very accomodating and informed me that a fix was in process.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
As has been pointed out above, the form doesn't really require IE. The form is broken for all browsers. If the form(s) were fixed, I suspect all browsers would work fine. The note about using "The " Internet Explorer Browser is a red herring.
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
you need to move.
BC
Go to the house.gov link above the statement and contact her that way.
This sig no verb.
I'm sorry. That was meant as sarcasm. Looks like people didn't take it that way ;)
Hey, it got written up, it might as well get posted somewhere. Maybe her staff will decide to start reading Slashdot today...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
She had one of those speeches that provided absolutely nothing to the debte. Sadam is bad/evil..blah blah blah, but her main points: How much will the war cost, How long will it take, exactly how many on our side will perish and Have we finished the war on terrorism.
No set of answers to any of these questions would change her mind, so why ask them?
Cost should be a basis on whether or not we get into a war? Now that is immoral.
If a war was known to take only 1 day, as opposed to 1 year, then it's some how better? What if in that 1 day 10x the number of people died hastily as oppose to 1/10th that number over a year?
How many will die? There's never a way to figure this out. We estimated what now seem to be pretty big loses on the original, yet never came close to that amount. We did the same thing on peace keeping missions. While life is extremly valuable, this metric and this resolution is useless.
Have we finished the war on terrorism? I guess she doesn't beleive this has any impact on that war.
anyhow, i wish her form was working now, i wouldn't mind sending her mail i'm sure she wouldn't mind deleting.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
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)
personally handing over cash and/or showing them pictures of them in bed with three midgets, two underage kids, a great dane and a defrocked nun. Both is best. You'll get what you want.
normal hard money campaign contribution
soft money campaign contribution
well written short to the point snail mail letter, 1 page tops
fax
telephone call
do nothing, watch sports, wrestling or sitcoms on tv
spend all your time downloading mp3's and mooovees
take part in protests carrying signs and whatnot
e-mail
Actually, from analysing the syntax and structure of the website, I concluded that the page was written by a middle-aged white guy. What was the basis for your conclusion?
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
Don't be so serious. People joke about the Irish, for example. If we treat middle eastern people differently, we are dicriminating against them.
Unlike most people, I have Saudi and UAE and Iranian friends. They are not fragile.
If you want the writerep page for a rep who isn't yours, all you need is the state and the zip+4 of some address in his district. (Or just a zip, assuming USPS's zip+4 lookup works. It tells me I don't exist.) Conveniently, every rep has an office in their district, and makes its address easy to find.
At least someone on Wolf's staff knows the difference between email and webforms. Everytime I see a rep's "email me" link lead to writerep, I want to flood them with messages saying "WEBFORMS ARE NOT EMAIL!"
As much as I would really truly love to say she is a tool for Bill Gates it honestly looks like she is NOT. According to Open Secrets she didn't get any money from Microsoft. Just to be sure I went ahead and went through all the pages of the Microsoft donations and I could not find her listed anywhere. Looks like the bulk of her money comes from labor unions. Also if you look at the source it was created with Frontpage 5.0.
So my guess is the whole "Use Microsoft Internet Explorer" bit is more of a lack of knowledge in creating web forms, so they used a tool that generated stuff for Internet Explorer only. My advice, pen a nice letter to her explaining and possibly offering to help, if will go a lot farther then hate and spit, especially since it looks like NONE of her money comes from Microsoft, hence this is NOT a conspiracy, I repeat NOT a conspiracy, simply a honest mistake made by someone who probably doesn't know better.
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...'
I sent e-mails Tom Daschle and Tim Hutchinson using Galeon and it worked fine. I think that each Senator is responcible for his own website, so maybe whoever designed that particular site didn't know what they were doing.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
This is a bad thing happening in the U.S. culture. People are too serious. I didn't assume Tannaz is a male. It was just a sloppy joke. Anyhow, I don't speak Farsi.
The big issue is that the U.S. senators and representatives have not bought themselves some good programming for communication. Why are things still such a mess?
My middle eastern friends and I joke about the U.S. government's love of bombing:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By joking about the U.S. invading the island of Kiribati, the New Zealand publication Spinner has delayed a plan by the U.S. government to invade every other country. The U.S. military forces plan to start with the small countries first, then work their way up to the larger ones.
The U.S. government has invaded 14 countries in the last 33 years, and has found it so profitable that it decided to invade all the others.
U.S. Army General Mayhem said yesterday that the military would delay the invasions while they investigate the possibility that Spinner's story was prompted by a security leak.
General Mayhem said that the U.S. would not actually invade every other country. There are no plans to invade France. "We wouldn't want to seem arrogant", he said.
Following the fine example set by others here, I figured I'd go to my Congressman's official website and "send an e-mail." Being lazy, I simply took the link to Rep. Tubbs Jones (http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones/) and changed the name to holt.
Of course, I expected that to work. (And, of course, I was wrong.) Rep. Rush Holt's (NJ) official website is at http://holt.house.gov. Doesn't seem to be any consistency in anything on the House pages!
In a recent 'Ask Slashdot' the president of a university student society complained that the university had blocked access to Kazaa and was complaining it was censorship, and asked what the slashdot community thought of this. To my surprise, there was a chorus of people saying "Stop whining... these are university resources, file sharing is pointless, takes huge bandwidth, etc...". I think the same thing applies here. 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. Personally I love Mozilla/Phoenix, but that doesn't mean that the government should necessarily support any whim I may have. 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 :)
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Really, she is your congresswoman, so any comments should come from you. There is probably just some IE geek out there who designed a nifty little form retrieval for her that only runs in IE, without thinking about the implications and those who would not be able to use it. Similar to those who write pages in FrontPage then don't think to test if other browsers can view the page.
I agree with 1 and 2. A good test of a joke is if people find it funny. This one people did not find funny.
But atleast the melissa-joan-hart.com site is validated as html 4.01 according to validator.w3c.org
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
UA-Spoofing doesn't work for Ms.[0] Tubbs-Jones, at least, not in Konqueror.
__
[0]Never quite sure what title to use, since "The Honourable Ms..." won't suffice in this case
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
as someone who has worked in the office of a US Senator, I can assure you that the program the press people are trained on and use to make office websites IS Frontpage-- which probably helps account for why Mozilla doesnt work so well with them.