Army/dod Websites

[chikpee]

I'll preface this by mentioning I work in the defense sector, mostly Army and Navy.

I spent five hours last night trying to complete some mandatory online bullshite training. All I had to do was race through it and get the pretty PDF certificate saying I did everything and email it to my boss. Right as I came to the final section, I couldn't complete it because I was using Chrome and the interactive Flash-based quiz at the end wouldn't play nice with my browser. So I had to redo the whole frickin' thing in IE (it was one of those ones where you had to actually flip through every slide and watch every video, couldn't just skip to the end and take the test).

That's just the latest incident in my six long years of head-bashing-keyboard frustration with defense sector web coding.

Hell, the only reason I haven't totally given up on Windows on my home machine and entirely switched to Linux or Mac OS X is because of my work and the Windows and IE-only design attitude. And don't get me started about the actual desktop applications you have to use for the Army and Navy..."porting software" must be a dirty word at DISA.

Are there libraries for Java and ActionScript/Flash that are purposefully designed to be as cripplingly dependent upon Windows API's, ActiveX, and Internet Explorer's "screw it" attitude towards W3C standards, as humanly possible? If so, I swear to God that every web designer that DoD hires to make its sites and online apps is using them.

(I don't even have to ask about ASP.NET and VBScript.....I already know the answer to that one )

I'd love to see the JSP source code that DKO, AKO, and other big military and defense web portals use, the header must look like...

import javax.servlet.jsp.MethLikeDependenceUponMicrosoft.* 

</rant>

Edited May 1, 2011 by chikpee