[Novalug] Administrivia: don't use URL shorteners

Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org
Sat Jan 24 06:58:38 EST 2015


On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 10:40:48AM -0500, Dan Arico via Novalug wrote:
> What about government sites like the IRS? A lot of business filings
> have to be done on-line and a lot of them require not only Adobe but
> also IE for access.

Yes, there are sites like that, designed and built by ineducable morons
who have failed to grasp even the first principles of the web.  I could
say (I have said ) a lot of snarky things about that, but today, let me
just quote this guy:

	"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X'
	label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
	before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a
	document written on another computer, another word processor,
	or another network."
	-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

Quoted here:

	Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign
	http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

In practice, such sites nearly always work with sensible web browsers
and open-source PDF software.  The ones that don't can nearly always
be fooled via:

	User Agent Switcher
	http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

---rsk



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