On Fri, 30 May 2003, John Woodard wrote:
If the authors of the catalogue cds used an open standard to sell their wares maybe they might get more business. One wonders if RS Components et al had a seriously large account withdraw their business because the couldn't read the catalogue cd with the operating system/browser of their choice things might be a little different.
Before anyone starts a boycott on the basis of my post, I should point out that I don't know for sure that RS, or any of the other specific firms Gerald mentioned, do require IE for their CDs. I was just taking an educated guess at what might be going on. A subsequent check of the one of my own catalogue CDs (Guilbert,) on which I was mainly basing this idea, suggests that the guess wasn't that educated after all, i.e. this CD appears to provide its own browser, which, as far as I can tell, isn't IE. (In fact, the html on the CD seems to have some variable names in its most crucial <a href=""> tags, which neither Mozilla nor IE can understand.)
Sorry for sowing such confusion.