[Ti] Re: Microsoft standards - was :Browser Troubles

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 23, 2004, at 2:54 PM, Dr Trevor J. Hutley wrote:

> Is there a professional way we can approach these deviant 
> (non-standard-compliant) sites ?  Somewhere to refer them to, as to 
> how to correctly write and set-up a site to be standards compliant? 
> Rather than just sending a rude letter?  So that we can contribute to 
> a better web future.

Complain to their developer, his/her supervisor, and who ever else 
controls the situaiton, and complain loud and often.  My ISP, Charter 
Communications, used to have a support site that would only work with 
IE on a PC.  Try to load the support site, and it would attempt to 
install some software - ActiveX stuff I suppose.  If you didn't have a 
"compliant" browser you'd get a message that your operating system or 
browser wasn't supported.  Ironic coming from a support website for an 
ISP.

I got a little miffed over it and called support just to complain about 
it.  The excuse was that "most of our customers use Windows".  My reply 
was "Well, you got some that don't.  What ya' do about it?"  I think I 
called a dozen or more times in the span of six months or so.  They 
gave me a "case number" because I couldn't get the support site to work 
and couldn't access the settings for my personal webpage site.  Every 
time I called I gave them that case number and told them my issue still 
is not resolved.  Finally one day I got a tech who said they'd had so 
many complaints that they were changing the site.  And the guy I talked 
to actually used Mac OS X.  About two weeks later the Charter support 
site started working for me on both linux and Mac OS X, with any 
browser I wanted to use.
--
Chris