[Ham-Mac] Re: FCC Discrimination Against Mac Users

[Richard Fall]

At 7:41 PM -0500 5/20/03, you wrote:

>John, K8AJS
>
>I was sorry to hear that you confirmed the same problem I had doing an
>ONLINE FILING of a modification.  I was hopeful you found a solution.  I
>tried and had the same failure with Safari, Explorer and Mozilla.  Yes, I
>did report the bug to the Safari development team and even tried in OS9.
>
>I called the FCC and the web page guru said parts of the web page
>[http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/index.html] is not compatible with the Apple
>Macintosh operating systems (OS9 and OSX) and they have no plan to change.
>His suggestion to do ONLINE FILING was to use someone's PC.  I did and it
>worked. I posted the Mac OS issue to the Apple discussion group and did not
>receive one comment.  I don't think Apple cares and neither does the FCC.
>
>The bottom line is if you need to process an ONLINE modification to your ham
>license, use a PC and you will not have problems.  If you try to use your
>Mac,  you will just get frustrated and it will be a big time waster.

John et al,

      I did some review of the HTML code written for the FCC web pages
that are giving Mac users problems, and here's what I think:

      The problem is NOT with the MacOS in any way, shape or form.  The
problem is that the FCC has CHOSEN to write a Java applet that works
only in browsers running on Windows systems.  The HTML code checks
the OS type and browser version in deciding some details of how to use
the applet, and the HTML coder apparently wasn't even courteous enough
to provide an error message if the OS/browser information was incompatible
with the applet.  You just get a blank screen, and are left to figure
out what happened on your own.

      Why would they choose to write an applet that works only on the
Windows platform?

      The answer is anybody's guess, but you pick from the following list:

	o The coder who wrote this page wanted to use a feature
	  that was only available in Microsoft's Java implementation--
	  i.e., they fell into Microsoft's trap of using Windows-
	  specific Java extensions that are incompatible with other
	  platforms (this is what the ongoing Microsoft/Sun lawsuit
	  is about),

	o The coder who wrote this page didn't know about the
	  incompatibilities between Microsoft's Java implementation
	  and the industry-standard Java implementation and, when
	  problems cropped up, simply put checks in the code to
	  avoid the problem rather than fixing it,

	o The coder who wrote this page (or his/her boss) couldn't
	  care less about making the web pages fully cross-platform
	  compatible--i.e., they believe that only Windows machines
	  exist and other platforms are not worth worrying about
	  (they bought into Microsoft's big lie).

SOAPBOX MODE ON
---------------

      This sort of problem really burns my *ss.  I was the VP of Engineering
of a large Internet company in 2000 - 2001, and we took great care to
make everything about our site as platform and browser-independent as
possible.  Usually, this wasn't a lot of work, it just meant that we stayed
away from using platform-specific features such as incompatible Java extensions,
or at least wrote two versions of each web page with similar features, and
used browser and OS detection code to deliver the proper one.  Anything
else is just pure laziness.

      Further, as a taxpayer, and a Mac user, I am incensed that they
would use my dollars in a way that disenfranchises me from the process.

SOAPBOX MODE OFF
---------------

      Bottom line, there is no technical reason why the FCC ULS site
should not work with all OS's and most browsers (except for the oldest,
most broken ones).  And, as a government agency that should not be playing
favorites when it comes to OS's, they should be brought to task for their
short-sighted approach.

      Unfortunately, talking with the technical people at the FCC will
get nowhere fast--most IT or software people are simply going to say
"that's the way it is" and move on with their other work.  It seems to
me that the most useful approach would be to go to the top, where they
are most likely to understand the argument that they should not be
discriminating against a significant segment of their customer base.

      I'm sufficiently cynical about the possibility of changing the
FCC's mind about this that I probably won't try to start the complaining
process, but if someone else wants to give it a try, I'll join in....

- Rich
  WA6FXP