This is inexcusable. After spending several billion dollars, the federal government apparently can’t manage to include Mac support in its website for online grant applications.
I rant a lot about open standards, but this is a perfect example of why they’re important. There’s nothing complex or challenging about building a website that works on both Macs and PCs. There’s a set of very clear standards that you can follow to ensure that your web site will work on all browsers. Sure, there are occasional incompatibilities, but there should be enough room in a budget that runs into the “tens of billions” to fix the occasional incompatibility.
There’s no excuse for requiring someone to acquire a particular operating system or web browser in order to participate in a government program. While we can debate whether the government should be required to use open standards for internal business, in cases like this where the government deals with the general public, they should be required to adopt open standards where ever they are available.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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