Another perspective on the news

I read this article in eWeek: Microsoft's standards are no standards at all . With all respect to the writer, it seemed to me that it drew odd conclusions from the facts as I understand them.

{BTW, I posted on this earlier today.  I deleted and re-posted because I felt my original criticised the author, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, rather than the conclusions in the article itself. I don't want to fall short of my own requirement for civility in blogging. }

The eWeek article was generally about document standards, and ranged across four topics:

Document formats: "Of course, if Microsoft were to open its formats, that wouldn't be a problem, but the Evil Empire hasn't done that in the past and I see no reason to think they will any time soon. "

Office 12 will use open XML formats by default. "Microsoft confirmed in a recent letter to the European Union’s Telematics Between Administrations Committee that the rights granted under the licenses for the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas are perpetual in nature and that Microsoft will provide non-discriminatory access to future versions of those specifications."

There are some concerns from the open source community that Microsoft's licensing of these formats may not be compatible with the GNU General Public License. See the article MS Office XML Formats not OK with GNU. Regardless of how that argument resolves, the new formats will make documents accessible in a number of ways: the data in them (maybe financial reports) is now accessible to (and can be created from) business applications like SAP; the document styles can quicky be examined and changed by a variety of tools (eg an Adobe utilty for a Word document); and the documents will be much easier to store and retrieve (in Documentum, say, or Filenet) over long retention periods.

Backward Compatibilty. "For that matter, try reading a sophisticated Office XP document with Word 2 or 6. Microsoft's office formats only look stable and interoperable. They actually change with every version to help make sure you have to buy the next edition of Microsoft Office"

Technology evolves. The issue of backward compatibilty is well-understood and to some extent inevitable.Try to play a CD on a record turntable; or an MP3-encoded CD on a 1995 CD player. More to the point, try to open a Photoshop 6.0 document with Photoshop 1.0.

However, Office XP and Ofice 200 will be able to read the new the Office XML formats. Which leads nicely to the next topic ...

Long-term document access: "In 1985, I was briefly involved as a NASA representative on a NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) committee dealing with long-term data storage. The formats we decided on for storing data were ASCII, which, indeed, almost anything can still read, and EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code).

I'll be surprised if more than one in twenty tech-savvy readers today remember EBCDIC, but it was a major format in its day. Indeed, if you visit NARA today, you'll find that our works lives on because a lot of information is still kept in EBCDIC on 9-track magnetic tape and 3480-class magnetic tape cartridges."

Granted, this isn't about EBCDIC per se. It's about the importance of long-term recoverability of documents. That requirement isn't addressed by choosing a simple data representation and "standardizing" on it. All that would do is freeze document capabilities at that level. In other words: "we can't add new document capabilities; no-one will be able to read those documents!" If we had frozen document standards at the EBCDIC level, for example, they couldn't express any of the pictographic languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, ...

We'll be better able to retrieve documents saved against a published, popular and "freely available" XML definition and an extensible document object model. The Microsoft formats mentioned above are a good start. They don't have to be the only formats people use, and doubtless the industry will provide alternatives and improvements. They are a very good step on the road to interoperable and accessible documents, though. They will be popular, too, so it's a shame to see them characterised as somehow evil.

Website accessibility from multiple browsers: "Gary Krakow of MSNBC found that you simply can't file the claim if you're using Firefox, Netscape or any of the other major third-party browsers.

You either ask for help very nicely using Microsoft products, or you don't get help at all online, seems to be what FEMA is saying.

If your home PC is a Linux PC or a Mac, forget about it. There are ways around these problems so you can run IE 6 on these systems. WINE will do the trick for Linux and Virtual PC 7 will do it for the Mac … Of course, first you have to have those programs.

Oh, not to mention that Microsoft is encouraging Web developers to write for the new IE and the fully secured version of IE 7 will only work on Vista. 

So, what does that mean? Does it mean that if a Katrina happened in, say, 2007, only users running Vista will be able to seek help from government agencies that have kept up to date with Microsoft?

It looks that way to me. "

Looks like it's the website  design that is the problem. It's quite possible to build a website accessible from multiple browsers. www.microsoft.com is an example. So is this http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

:-)

It's a fact of life, though, that there are multiple competing browsers and they differ on the website features they support.  There's also an incremental cost to to supporting more than one browser type on a particular site. So, it would be charitable to assume that the FEMA folks -- rushing to get a site up and running asap -- designed a site accessible to the largest number of users. If that's the case, it seems likely they made a practical, as well as a humanitarian, decision.

I guess my point is this: it's important that influential people challenge our beliefs, but the most powerful conclusions are based on analysis that's deep, broad and balanced. I was offended (and this is strictly a personal opinion -- maybe I should get out more) that this bully pulpit ignored and discounted some facts, and drew the most negative possible conclusions from others.

Seems like an opportunity lost.

Comments

[Richard Schwartz]

Oh, you're being waaaay too kind on this one. Way too forgiving.

Support for multiple browsers ought to have been a major requirement for this site. It's not, by the way, a quick job put up by FEMA for this hurricane. It's a general purpose disaster aid site with a picklist showing several different recent disasters. They've front-ended it about a half-dozen screens that you have to click-through in order to get to the registration page... talk about red tape! And then you get to a very simple form (or what should be a very simple form!) not unlike what you might find on any of several thousand e-commerce sites -- the vast majority of which are not specific to any one browser. It's bad business for a company to build such a site, and it's an unconscionable dereliction of duty to the public for the government agency charged with managing time-critical resources during a disaster to do so.

There's no incremental cost at all to supporting more than one broswer on a form like this if you're willing to stick to a simple design for your site and to use standard HTML for the implementation. A government site, and certainly one providing time-critical services for people in distress, should not have the type of bells and whistles that this one has. The site's designers clearly decided to put in some bell or whistle, probably intended to make some marginal improvement in usability -- but what's the point of making those improvements if you have to make the site completely unusable to a segment of the user community? It's a matter of misplaced priorities. It's that simple. They could make it work a tiny bit better for 90% of the users, or just make it work for 100% of the users. That's a no-brainer when you're in the emergency services business, but they went the route of no-brains.

The alternative if the only computer you have easy access to: call FEMA. Now that's a usability nightmare no doubt, not to mention a resource drain for FEMA that just adds to the cost of the bad web design decisions.

And guess what!? If you select Katrina from the dropdown of available disasters on their form, they still list "Snow/Ice" and "Earthquake" as choices in the "Damage Type" field! Talk about Usability 101! They'd have done a lot more for usability if they had put their design effort into the logic connecting the fields instead of into whatever it is (I can't really tell, but it might be contextual help text that they've put in) that is making them IE-specific.

In the time they spent doing browser detection and putting together the page that informs users of Firefox, Netscape, Safari and Opera that they're SOL, they could have ripped up their IE-specific design and replaced it with something that works properly. At least they could have if they were competent and had been given appropriate requirements.

[cliffreeves]

"Oh, you're being waaaay too kind on this one. Way too forgiving."

I stand corrected, Richard. I do worry, though, about the bashing government agencies get after a tragedy like this. The recriminations are so brutal, that I suspect the agencies involved just get numbed by the abuse, or overreact by firing the very people who might learn from -- and fix -- the situation.

However, what surprised me most about the eWeek article is how it used Katrina and the FEMA website story to pursue a completely different agenda.

Convoluted reasoning is irritating enough, but bad taste is harder to ignore.