World Wide Web Consortium objects to US Copyright Office’s Internet Explorer-only browser plan

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has written to the US Copyright Office regarding a notice of proposed rulemaking. The notice asks if persons filing electronic-only preregistration forms will experience difficulties if the Office requires them to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser. W3C comments to the Copyright Office suggest that requiring a single browser is inappropriate for government services and encourages the Office to pursue standards-based access in accordance with US Federal policy.

In the letter, W3C states that the “proposed single-vendor preregistration service will exclude large classes of potential users.” W3C writes, “While a large proportion of the marketplace uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer to browse the Web, certain classes of users will find it either impossible or extremely inconvenient to do so. Of the three popular desktop computing platforms in use at the present — Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS, and Linux/Unix — the latest versions of Internet Explorer are only available for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.”

Read the full letter here.

MacDailyNews Take: Bravo, W3C! Contact the The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress (which interestingly works perfectly fine with Apple’s Safari borwser) here: http://www.copyright.gov/help

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Security expert: Microsoft Internet Explorer ‘just cannot be trusted, use alternate browser’ – July 02, 2004
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Microsoft axes Internet Explorer for Mac – June 13, 2003

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