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Brian Chin's Weblog surveys the Web to spot what people are talking about ...
September 08, 2005FEMA's IE-only formFor days now, the tech press and blogosphere have been taking FEMA to task for offering Katrina survivors and relief workers an online registration form that only works with Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. Few reports or commentaries that I've seen, however, offer any explanation for this short-sighted move. Ars Technica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher, however, actually contacted FEMA to get one: Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind. Sounds reasonable enough to me, although I suspect it's not going to do much to counter the criticism that FEMA was unprepared for Katrina. Category: March of progressPosted by Brian Chin at September 8, 2005 02:21 PM Comments
The Bush administration cut the funding for FEMA pre-disaster mitigation in April 2001 just after they took office. Then they gave this money to the wealthy in their tax cuts. If these Republicans can get votes because they promise to cut taxes, they should loose votes when those tax cuts kill people... Posted by: Dr. Forbush at September 8, 2005 02:30 PMThe Bush administration cut the funding for FEMA pre-disaster mitigation in April 2001 just after they took office. Then they gave this money to the wealthy in their tax cuts. If these Republicans can get votes because they promise to cut taxes, they should loose votes when those tax cuts kill people... http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2004-09-22/cover.html
Hopefully an incident like this will broaden the views of developers that would code a browser-specific application. As the online audience grows, with divergent devices (pdas, phones), do does the requirement to code across browsers and platforms. An angle of this story that I don't think has been brought up yet is that the FEMA site is not compliant with the government's own standards for accessibility. Posted by: DL Byron at September 10, 2005 08:32 AMPost a comment
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