By Lucy Sherriff for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Perhaps it is just feeling very retro, but whatever the reason,
the W3C is not impressed, according to a report from InfoWorld.
In a letter to the Copyright Office, Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel
Weitzner, W3C director and W3C technology and society domain leader
respectively, wrote: "The proposed system would be contrary to at
least the spirit of federal information policy adopted by the
E-Government Act of 2002."
The office says that it does intend to be compatible with a
wider variety of browsers, such as Mozilla, Firefox and Safari. It
said that it is developing its systems using off-the-shelf Siebel
Systems software which has only been tested with IE and
Netscape.
Julia Huff, the Copyright Office's COO said that the agency was
under tight time constraints as it is obliged to have a
pre-registration system up and running by 24 October. "It [our
system] may work well with other browsers, but they haven't tested
those yet with the version of the Siebel software we're using right
now."
She went on to say that the agency plans to upgrade next year,
to a version of the Siebel software that does support other
browsers.
Meanwhile, Berners-Lee and friends, called for a vendor neutral
approach from the agency, and warned that single browser
compatibility would restrict access to the agency's services. Many
MacOS, Linux and Unix users wouldn't be able to access the service,
and disabled users could also have difficulties, Berners-Lee
said.
© The Register
2005
