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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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This brings up an interesting thought though. Should governments and states be able to prefer you to use a certain browser or should they be required to make the website function on all..
If the government cared at all about accessibility, then you'd be able to do your taxes in an HTML form.
Yeah. Now that we have a functioning FCC again we might see some progress.
But then how will congress give taxpayer dollars to a private company to do a terrible job?
I mean, we COULD have a government run agency that retains skilled engineers and keeps a good talent and knowledge pool of people specialized at delivering services that hundreds of millions of people rely on OR we could give money to the lowest bidder and blame "government inefficiency" for the contractor's fuckups.
Pretty sure the old fuckers in the legislature aren't writing that into the contracts. If you ask them what browser they're using they'll probably say "internet."
You would have to find a good definition of "all browsers", and I think that would be nearly impossible.
I absolutely agree that governments should support Firefox, that's a reasonable claim. But do they need to support the earliest version of netscape? Or the browser I made as a hobby project last week and published as open source? There's a limit to what's reasonable and workable.
Specific versions of basic standards would do. HTML forms, as another comment says. With tables and CSS which doesn't make it unusable if your browser doesn't support CSS.
As the others have mentioned, it's about following standards. Like if you specify a design for a plug using standard measurement units, people can then make plugs that plug into that using whatever measurement and calibration tools they want because they all generally follow standards.
It would be like if the government released some device that was meant to be repaired by anyone but used some proprietary Apple screw head for all the screws. That's not repairable by anyone, that's only repairable by Apple customers.
Conforms to a specific revision of HTML with a specific revision of JavaScript and css, also requiring it to not use any proprietary extensions of either HTML or JavaScript.
Or the government could just use PDFs and email, I think that might be able to accomplish all the functionality of most websites.
Most government sites must be accessible to individuals with disabilities such as low vision or other imapirments. You can't require a blind person to use chrome to apply for a job.
They just ignore it, even if it's law somewhere, because "are you nuts, everybody's using Chrome, you are a luddite boomer, we'll do things the normal way".
Well, it would be nice to be enlightened about countries where government sites really are usable with screenreaders and\or Lynx.
It would be reasonable for a govt to tell Google that actions taken on their platform which force users to use a certain browser to access a govt website are violating some equal opportunity law or something.
That's not really where the problem lies. It lies in the choices made when developing the site. "Do we use a framework or feature that isn't part of the HTML standard to force users to use the subset of browsers that support that or do we use one of the many other options that do follow the standard?"
It wouldn't surprise me if those choices are being made by some web devs because those high up don't even think about it and those implementing it don't think much about the standards and just do it the way they do it because it's easy or that's just the way they know how to do it.
Governments (and their agents) shouldn't be choosing proprietary options that force people to use a specific company's resources.