US Copyright Office Considering MSIE-only website

wikinerd writes "The United States Copyright Office asks whether you would have any problem if you were required to use Microsoft Internet Explorer in order to pre-register a work via their website. The Norwegian government recently said no to proprietary formats, but it seems that the US government sites should be informed about the existence of non-Microsoft Web browsers, such as Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, and Safari. I have written a letter about this issue, which is posted on my blog for everyone to copy and base on it their own response. If they see how many people use alternative browsers, they'll probably reconsider and stay within the W3C standards."

Comments

Re:Swings and Roundabouts

[morgan_greywolf]

Don't let them make the mistake.

Write an intelligent and well-informed comment to:

Copyright GC/ I&R
P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024-0400

How long will the situation last?

[Deslock]

According to their website: "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."

It'd be easier to respond to their question if they posted an estimated date for when other browsers will be supported.

Gartner advises against IE-Only development

[grandmofftarkin]

Since big buisness and governments seem to take Gartner's advise with more enthusisum than the average slashdotter you might want to point them to this Gartner piece, should you choose to write to them:

ID Number: G00125170, "Design Web Applications for Standards, Not for Browsers", (2 March 2005)

Siebel CRM to blame

[Benanov]

As covered on Groklaw, this is due to the fact that the Copyright Office is using an old version of Seibel CRM.

Opinion:

Of course, why they'd use some substandard MS-only piece of garbage is beyond me, but it's not because they were actively looking to cut out non-MS people...just someone suggested a crappy product and standardized on it.

Nothing new.

What about Section 508?

[jafiwam]

Uhm... Doesn't Section 508 HTML/design standard make it ILLEGAL for a government web site to not follow the standard?

Section 508 has all sorts of stuff that goes beyond W3C to include formatting, layout, table naming, etc. to ensure that a web site is easily browsable by non-sighted users' browser tools. (i.e. Lynx-like)

They can't do what they are saying they want to do without breaking the law.

(It's not that hard to make a compliant web site, you just need to work it in the process from the beginning.)