Copyright Office: Everyone Uses MSIE, Right?

richardtallent writes "Tim Bray caught that the United States Copyright Office's upcoming copyright pre-registration web application apparently only works with Internet Explorer, and they are seeking written comments from anyone who might have a problem being forced to use IE. Slashdotters, start your snail-mail."

Comments

The best answer I usually give..

[Lally Singh]

I simply tell people that IE's been discontinued for the macintosh. Everyone recognizes the Mac as a different platform that other people use, and the fact that IE is no longer shipping on it is a good motivator. Simple, easy to understand for non-techs, and respectful.

Re:The best answer I usually give..

[nocomment]

Well I was thinking you can illustrate that not only is market share for IE going down because of things like Firefox, and people switching to other browsers, but the platforms that IE used to run are also no longer being supported. e.g. Solaris, HP-UX, Mac OS[0]. Not only that but whatever features they are considering that "require" IE will probably alienate a large section of Windows users as well.

[0]Well, sorta. You can still get it, AND it comes pre-installed in OS X, but when was the last update to it? Is the bug (err feature) that are thinking of implementing require the Windows version of IE? probably.

At least they're asking!

[freality]

A few years ago they probably would have assumed IE and skipped the public comment process. Now there's too many creatives using macs.

Now, asking for 5 copies of a comment letter is like saying "Unless you're a corporate lawyer representing a major publishing house, keep your comments to yourself. You serf."

And no, they don't care about Linux users since it's the office of copyRIGHT, not copyLEFT.. that office is located at creativecommons.org.

software design government style

[Captain BooBoo]

At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office's system for online preregistration, it is not entirely clear whether the system will be compatible with web browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.1 and higher. Filers of preregistration applications will be able to employ these Internet Explorer browsers successfully. Support for Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, and Mozilla 1.7.7 is planned but will not be available when preregistration goes into effect. Present users of these browsers may experience problems when filing claims.

Sounds like they hired the developers under the common practice of the "lowest bidder"

"You design for IE? Does it work in IE7 as well?"

[Penguin]

Another possibility is to mention that IE7 renders the page different than IE6 - and leave the question whether they want to "design for IE6", "design for IE7" or design according to standards.

When people state that they are "designing for Internet Explorer", it is pretty easy to ask what version they are "designing for". When they get uneasy about the upcoming (and apparently unexpected) IE7 and the memories of (poor design with) several stylesheets, several conditional scripts, the DOM/standards argument is pretty good.