UK Govt Posts IE only portal site

It seems the UK government contracted with Microsoft to build a premier
new portal site for for UK resident access to government information on
the web, and they appear to have made it an Internet Explorer only site.

There are some reports the site will work with Netscape, I think the
site itself claims it will work with netscape 6.

Apparently the problem is partially that the website will only recognize
browser certificates possessed by Internet Explorer 5.01 on Windows, so
with other browsers or IE on other platforms you can't make
transactions.

The portal is at:

http://www.gateway.gov.uk/

There's a slashdot discussion about it raging at

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/29/2058238&mode=thread

The Register has an article about it here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19239.html

Linuxuser discusses it at:

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue11/gateway.html

Opera Software, the publishers of the Opera browser, plan to lodge a
formal complaint with the UK government.  The Register had an article
about Opera's reaction at:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19275.html

I posted links to the W3C HTML and CSS validators in this comment on
Slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/05/29/2058238&cid=312

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2001 00:38:28 UTC