Looks like Katrina victims [are being forced to use Internet Explorer 6.0](FEMA Aid Site Blocks Access To Firefox, Macs, Linux Users) or higher to access the FEMA website in order to filoe claims for disaster benefits:
As if victims weren’t being subjected to enough hoops to jump through already.
Firefox on Mac 10.4 triggered that message for me. Good thing I’m not on the gulf coast.
If you check the current Red Cross pitting, you’ll see that Microsoft is at the Texas ops center handing out computers. That might explain things.
You see, only American made products should be used with the internet. All that Mozilla nonsense is from Linux, whixh was made by a fereigner, and anyhow rips off the good work done by the people of SCO. I don’t know that non-MS users should be considered as citizens, nor shouldthey be considered patriots. This is one nation that realizes that The internet is an American invention, and should be used with the one true computer company, Microsoft.
(Presumably, this means that their application page will be HTML-compliant in a week or two.)
Oh good grief. It’s small potatoes, but it’s just so emblematic of FEMA at this point, isn’t it?
As a Firefox user, I prefer things to work with a variety of browsers. But as a Web developer… come on, guys. Despite all the hoo-haw about Web development being platform independent, it ain’t. You want anything other than a text-and-pictures Web site - like a database driven website - to work on more than one browser, you pretty much have to make it detect which browser its running in and customize it for that browser.
Given that the current situation is very much time-critical, I think it’s unreasonable to pit FEMA for choosing the IE - the most popular browser by far - as the first supported browser.
In other words, putting up a site that works in IE in a few days trumps putting up a site that works with everything but takes 'em 2 weeks to write.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I’m about make this post on a “database driven website.” Using Firefox. From a Linux machine.
Either that, or I’m hallucinating.
According to the Slashdot thread on this fuckup, the FEMA site in question was basically a pre-existing intranet app that they quickly hacked to be publicly accessible after Katrina. I can kinda understand the situation if IE is the only supported browser on the FEMA network.
However, there is absolutely no fucking reason that you need ActiveX controls or some other bullshit IE-only extension to post data from a form to database.
I’m NOT a Web developer, but this makes no sense at all to me.
Just recently, the Firefox browser became an overnight success. People seemingly could use it right away, with full functionality everywhere they went. Was there some sort of preparatory campaign of getting website developers to tune their sites to customize for Firefox use? How did this work?
Baloney. Unless you’ve coded up some wacky ActiveX control to do something that should have been done some other way, you have to try hard to make your website IE dependant. 5$ says spoofing your browser ID lets you browse the site with no problems at all.
No, the reason it worked right away was that HTML has to adhere to certain standards, and [del]Netscape[/del] obeys those standards, while IE does not feel constrained to play by the rules.
Sorry, Athena, I, too, call bullshit. I’m a web developer, too, and I can tell you I can take Visual Studio.net and whip out an ASPX page that takes down information and stores it in a database in about thirty minutes and it’ll be compliant with any damn browser out there. Now, if you want it to look pretty and everything, then after I’m done pretty-ing it up it won’t be equally pretty in all browsers, but it’ll still WORK in all of them.
Guys, I never said it can’t be done. I said that it takes a bit more time to make sure it all works in every browser out there. You guys have never found little bits of code here and there that you have to tweak to make things looks nice and function correctly in IE, FireFox, and whatever other browsers are out there?
FEMA apparantly had something on their existing Web site that required modifications to work with additional browsers. I’m with everyone else in saying that was a stupid design to begin with. HOWEVER, if my boss comes to me and says “We need to put together a Katrina database ASAP”, my first instinct is to get the damn thing to work on IE, THEN do the modifications to make it work on other browsers.
What I am NOT going to do is say “It would take me 2 days to make it work in IE, but because of MSWidgetX that we use on 12 different pages it’s going to take me a week to make it work on other browsers. Guess the Hurricane victims have to wait a week.”
I didn’t say that it was impossible to do without ActiveX or other bullshit IE-only extensions. What I did say (or mean to say) is that if they are using said ActiveX or other bullshit IE-only extensions, modifying the website to NOT use those is going to take some time.
And face it - there’s a hell of a lot of pages that either flat out don’t work on anything other than IE or look and function like shit on anything other than IE. Like I said - I use Firefox myself, and prefer it to IE. On a given day, though, I go to more than a couple web sites that force me to use IE. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with the design, but that’s the way things are, and wishing that they weren’t that way ain’t gonna help the hurricane victims.
I used a UA switching extension and got all the way to the part where you actually start the registration process. I didn’t want to start posting data, because I don’t actually need hurricane aid.
I’ll see your five bucks, and raise you five more that the IE specific stuff doesn’t actually add any functionality, and the only thing they need to do to fix it is comment out a couple of lines of Javascript.
I think this is a poor pitting as well, for the following reasons:
Yes, it’d be peachy if the website could be accessed by all Internet-enabled computers. But I suspect that less than 5% of US computers can’t use IE6; and if that’s the case, then FEMA did just the right thing here.
Daniel
I just want to point out that the “enter the letters that appear above” word on the FEMA site for me is “turded.”
Thank God something is working right!
People on Slashdot tried it and reported that they were successfully able to spoof the site with Opera and Firefox. I haven’t tried it because I figure that the website really doesn’t need non-essential traffic.
Of course, but essential function comes first. Even if I’m making a webpage that’s only there to allow people to buy T-shirts, I make damned sure that it’s going to work on any browser. This means using server-side scripts that pipe standards-compliant HTML to the user. I’m not above using client-side scripts to pretty up a page with little effects and whatnot, but even then, you use a freaking NOSCRIPT element to provide the same functionality for people without javascript, instead of requiring them to make client-side modifications to view the damned page. You avoid browser-specific code. It’s easy, and, for a utilitarian application, it’s RULE NUMBER ONE.
For something as vital (and simple) as a disaster relief application form, there’s absolutely no excuse for authoring the page with any kind of browser requirements built in.
If some schmuck wants to make his online portfolio viewable only to Windows users running IE7+ at 1024X768 with Javascript enabled and the Macromedia Flash 7.5 plugin installed, that’s no sweat off anyone’s balls.
When you’re talking about a simple form to allow devastated people to apply for much-needed aid, it should work the first time, even if your user is accessing your site through LYNX running on their PDA. It doesn’t take any more time to ensure that – all it requires is a bit of common sense, applied at the start of the project.