On Friday 30 May 2003 1:22 pm, Dan Hatton wrote:
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.)
Like I said these are obviously designed to run on Windows some of the CDs have Mac OS friendly stuff, but in general we are talking about Windows here. Now I have nothing against people who want to run Windows, they have the right to a choice. Also those who want to run an alternative OS should have a choice and by using an open standard such as HTML/XML these CDs would give that choice.
I'm not advocating anyone should boycott these suppliers just pointing out the fact that if a large customer did, we might just get a catalogue in a useable format for all. Which IMHO would benefit everybody, customers running the OS of their choice and the supplier getting the business of those who couldn't read the CD catalogue before.
Cheers, BJ