[TriLUG] Re: Wachovia Online Banking

[Jon Carnes]

> Not to sound mean, or anything, but... why in the sam hill do companies
> do this?  Is there anybody that doesn't understand
> that one of the most fundamental premises of web applications, is that
> they be client neutral? 

Phillip, they don't do it intentionally.  The architechture and 
applications they are using make assumptions (bad ones) about the browser.  
The folks doing the development are not true "developers" as you or I would 
use the word.  They are application programmers using specific applications 
to generate code.  Code which they can neither interprete or change.

As a minor example of that, recently our web group at HAHT created some 
applications that really have a hard time with non-MS clients.  The cookies 
generated by these apps were killing everyone elses applications.  It was 
easy to see what was going on, and I suggested some changes that would 
easily fix the probelm, but the applicatoins they used could not accomodate 
any changes.  

Mailman was the app that was causing me the most problem.  I had to go into 
the code for Mailman and modify it by hand so that it would handle the 
poison cookies left by the rotten MS centric applications.

The nice thing about OpenSource, is that you can adjust and adapt it.  The 
web guys could hardly believe that the source code could be modified and 
adjusted so easily... but that doesn't stop them from living in Redmond's 
camp and eating FUD out of Bill's hand.  

Don't get me wrong, I love our web guys.  They are great folks, and they 
were very receptive to moving our web cluster over to Apache on Linux, but 
they still use the tools from Redmond.

Jon Carnes