I just ran into this problem a day or two ago. I was applying for jobs all morning and ran into one that redirected me to brassring.com. Didn't think anything of that because I know a lot of employers outsource the online application process. But when Safari suddenly disappeared I got frustrated. I went back and tried again and the same thing happened.

How funny that I just experienced this within the last couple days and you report on it.

So, can we sue the makers of non-web-standards-compliant apps according to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Can you use Safari's "User Agent" feature to trick the browser detect into thinking it has found Explorer?

I hope you weren't applying for a job at a Maccentric graphic design shop

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Jonkun227 wrote:
I just ran into this problem a day or two ago. I was applying for jobs all morning and ran into one that redirected me to brassring.com. Didn't think anything of that because I know a lot of employers outsource the online application process. But when Safari suddenly disappeared I got frustrated. I went back and tried again and the same thing happened.

How funny that I just experienced this within the last couple days and you report on it.

How about a class action lawsuit for some of their profits??

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Guest wrote:
So, can we sue the makers of non-web-standards-compliant apps according to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

... like the idea of lawsuits but in this case I think it might be a good idea. Clueless management plus lazy web authors that don't want to be bothered to code for anything but IE have caused problems for too long. I think that it might take legal action to push these companies (both the companies that make the tools, BrassRing, MS, etc., and the companies that use these non stnadard tools) toward following web standards. That is, after all, why they are called standards. I don't think that an ADA suit would be the way to go, unless you could show that there is a preponderance of handicapped web users that use Macs over PCs. I think this might be a case where the Mac community (around 5% of web users, possibly more*) might constitute a class in and of itself.

*Nearly 5% of computers sold plus all the old units that people are still using. Seems like a safe guess to me.

While I would expect support for Safari, there's several times that companies just don't care to spend the money on dev and testing for a browser that the majority of people don't use. Of course as the Safari user base grows this cost will grow more necessary.

As a work around I've usually been able to use the Mac version of Firefox to work with some of these sites.

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Guest wrote:

While I would expect support for Safari, there's several times that companies just don't care to spend the money on dev and testing for a browser that the majority of people don't use. Of course as the Safari user base grows this cost will grow more necessary.

As a work around I've usually been able to use the Mac version of Firefox to work with some of these sites.

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Clueless management plus lazy web authors that don't want to be bothered to code for anything but IE have caused problems for too long. I think that it might take legal action to push these companies (both the companies that make the tools, BrassRing, MS, etc., and the companies that use these non standard tools) toward following web standards. That is, after all, why they are called standards.

If we're talking about the non-mac view of standards... IE is the standard, and all other browsers should confrom to it. Unfortunately the standards bodies aren't in charge. Microsoft is. Until they decide to implilment standards, any of the work done by web standards bodies is just more time wasting.

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mahuti wrote:
IE is the standard, and all other browsers should confrom to it.

Well said geoduck :)

IE is not standard. The standards for HTML were around LONG before IE. (You can't create a browser to read HTML until you define HTML.)

Tim Berners-Lee defined the first form of HTML, later dubbed HTML 1.0 in 1992-1993.

Internet Explorer was originally known as Spyglass Mosaic, and was purchased and renamed by Microsoft in 1995.

Neither Spyglass Mosaic or Internet Explorer have ever even tried to follow the HTML specifications given by W3C. Instead of taking the guideline and warping it, as has been suggested, the IE development team actually created their own tags for their own use, instead of adopting the ones in the HTML specs that would allow compliance with the standard. Clearly they didn't warp the spec, they just ignored it altogether.


The problem with suing for noncompliance with standards is that there isn't a single browser known to man that perfectly follows the entire spec(s). That is for a number of reasons. The big one is that most developers report conflicts in the spec that prevent them from perfect adoption. Some developers disagree with some of the spec, but that's usually just on cosmetic issues, like how a border set to CSS style "outset" should appear.

There's also trouble with the heirarchy of technologies. If the stylesheet that a document links to disagrees with the HTML, which one wins? 99% of the time the local HTML/embedded CSS wins. But some developers feel that there are situations where the master stylesheet file should reign.


So basically, while I recognize that this is mostly just idle conjecture, you won't get anywhere with a lawsuit because you can't show that any browser is following the standard. And while most try hard, that's not enough to beat IE into the ground.

Good luck, though!


- Jon

Safari crashes every time with brassring.com. I have to go to a public PC computer and pay by the minute to apply for jobs that use that site. I didn't know it was brassring's refusal to support Safari. Why do that? What's the message there? Bad marketing strategy.