Obama To Agencies: Optimize Web Content For Mobile 322
CWmike writes "President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices. Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days. Innovators in the private sector and the government have used the Internet and powerful computers to improve customer service, but 'it is time for the federal government to do more,' Obama said in the memo. 'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"
treat the symptom not the problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.
Foresight? (Score:2)
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Dude, the mobile revolution has been going on for years.
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Yeah, a couple of years. Not decades. By government standards, taking action now is actually pre-emptive!
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> Dude, the mobile revolution has been going on for years.
This is not a long time in terms of technology maturity. This is not a measurable amount of time in the eyes of the US Government.
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Beauacracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps we need to simplify the number of "programs", that might help too.
Re:Beauacracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help? How would eliminating farm subsidies help someone find information on WIC checks?
Knee-jerk anti-government responses may be great for karma-whoring, but there's no substance there. There may be a few edge cases where programs aren't pulling their weight and should be cut, but the vast majority of the government's efforts go into very important programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Dragging those programs into the 20th century is commendable.
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People like you have been bitching about knee-jerk anti-government responses for decades.
Now look what we have...an annual budget of over three trillion dollars (thanks to baseline budgeting, it's here to stay).
I have a better idea. How about YOU make a case for the programs you want to keep. All of them.
See ya next decade, 'cause it will take you that long.
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People already made the case for them, that's why they're law. If you want to get rid of them, you have to make a case for that. We don't just reset the government every time some asshole demands it.
If you don't like any of it, then you're free to leave. I'm sure you can find yourself a utopia without any government services.
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it would help if the different agencies had a single Standard Form and did things like share info (as required) where they overlap. What needs to be done is map the different agencies as to what they do and if an agency has say 85% of its duties done by other agencies then close that agency (reassign the balance to one of the other ones).
Re:Beauacracy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at Ron Paul's plan to cut 990 billion dollars, that's essentially what he does. The bulk of the savings comes from stopping the killing of foreigners, while the last third comes from merging departments together for greater efficiency.
But ya know..... Paul is nuts. Why would we listen to a nutty idea like promoting peace & increasing efficiency? It's craaaaazy. So the Cable News tells me. ;-)
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>>>the media are purposely not covering and reporting Paul and keeping people in the dark.
99% true. But the other 1% of the time, when they actually do report on Paul, it's to tell tell us he is either nuts or unelectable, and he doesn't stand a chance (even though he's in a solid second place in the delegate count). Do I think Paul will beat Romney?
No. But he did do better than the other 15 candidates... he came in a strong second. The TV media's decision to tell everyone that Paul should be i
Re:Beauacracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help?
How about all of them?
We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence. It has to provide supporting data that the job it is doing is needed and accomplishes the goals it was created for.
Farm Subsidies and WIC are easy things picked by most people as an example. Take a look at The U.S. Agency for International Development, Or the federal grant for $765,828 that was given to bring an International House of Pancakes franchise to Washington, D.C, and there are thousands more. The number of wasteful programs outweigh the number of good ones.
Re:Beauacracy (Score:4, Insightful)
How about all of them?
We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence.
I have a great idea, everyone. The Federal government is too wasteful - they're always making reports or wasting our money on things we don't need. So let's make each federal agency present a plan justifying it's existence to Congress. Every two years when a new Congress starts, each agency will come in turn to prove their worthiness with power point presentations, graphs, and spreadsheets. I know this will work, because we do it for Congressmen. They have to justify their existence to the voters every two years, and it's not like they have more important things to do in Washington than scrounging up donations and campaigning for 18 months in their districts.
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Yep, cutting USAID and its 0.5% of the federal budget will definitely solve our problems and in no way decrease our standing in the world community.
You have to cut somewhere. And yes that WILL solve our problems if we cut a whole bunch of 0.5% programs...
As for world standing, the world would never know. The contribution from private U.S. charities is far greater than the actual help USAID delivers (which is small, after all we ARE talking about a government program here with the tremendous overhead that
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>>>Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.
One simplification is to make SS and M like the food stamps program..... a needs-based system designed to help the 20-30 million poor persons. Those of us who have money will buy our own retirement through saving, our own medicine/insurance, and our own food at the store.
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One simplification is to make SS and M like the food stamps program..... a needs-based system designed to help the 20-30 million poor persons. Those of us who have money will buy our own retirement through saving, our own medicine/insurance, and our own food at the store.
Well, Medicaid is already for the poor.
How would this work for SS though? I'm upper middle class, my wife an I contribute to our 401(k)s, etc. So do I get a pass on my SS tax? Or do I pay into it without the expectation of getting anything back? What happens if the market tanks right before I retire, and the $1m I expected to have is now $500k? Am I eligible for SS to make up the difference? I don't think you've thought your plan through (or at least, not described it very well).
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>>>do I get a pass on my SS tax?
Simple. Do you get a pass on the Welfare or Food stamp or Unemployment taxes, even though you never collect? Do you get a pass on Government school tax, even though you never had kids, or you sent your kids to a private school?
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Oh and the eligibility would be based on lifetime income. If you fell short at the end of your life, or had a period of unemployment in the middle, you would fall below..... say $3 million ($60,000 per year per person) then you could collect SS.
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>>>Rob the middle class so the rich can have even more tax cuts.
Actually I think the rich's income (over $10 million) should be taxed 100%. And capital gains tax should be a graduated tax just like income tax... the more you make the more you pay. Make Warrne Buffett pay more.
AND I think the first $100,000 should be 0% income tax (though you still have to pay state and sales and gas and electric tax). So your attempt to paint me as some kind of anti-middle-class, pro-rich republican has failed.
A
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All of those programs should be terminated with as much haste as possible.
Dept of Education (Score:2)
That's a quick and easy one. The federal government doesn't educate anybody, that's the job of the states. If you want info on education in your state, or a state you're looking to move to, get it from that state where the education is being managed and performed.
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Yeah, screw poor children! Why don't they get jobs.
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Given a non-zero probability of parents in that situation getting belligerent about the idea of a stranger coming into their home and feeding their children, that sounds like it's fraught with the potential for either abuse/assault of the social workers involved, or at very least for it to be a really stressful situation for them.
You also seem to be assuming that they'd universally have adequate cooking equipment in the home.
I guess you could send someone to drop off pre-made meals, but enforcing a rule
Re:Beauacracy (Score:5, Insightful)
You are a fucking asshole.
My daughter came around before I was financially ready to have kids. (Which happens to a LOT of people) If it wasn't for food stamps, we'd have starved. Having a kid to support put me in hyperdrive. I learned as much as I could at college, quit to start a company, company luckily went pretty good (Till investors chewed me up like the naive kid I was at the time.), still got enough money out of the deal to pay off my student loans, put a down payment on a house, and the experience was better than a stupid degree for getting me into the corporate world. (They want results, not pieces of paper) I've since worked for several Fortune 500 companies, architecting huge projects. The peak taxes I've paid in a year (The year I got bought out of my company) was about $100,000. So I've more than paid back the food stamps and the time welfare paid to fix my car, although the guy who owned the repair place was such a "republican" so he threw a big fit about it being government money and really did a shitty job.
So shove your "Let's feed on the poor" up your ass. Next time it will be you that is poor. This life or the next.
The "Well if they can't afford to have kids, they shouldn't have kids" is the lamest cop-out of a non-realistic solution to a wide-spread problem. You ought get your ass kicked for saying something so stupid and selfish.
Basically you are saying my daughter should have been taken away from me back in the day? You suck shit. I raised her right, she's 22 now, has been thru college, just started her first career job making more money than I made at her age, and never got pregnant while a teenager.
I wish I knew who you were so I could beat some sense in your vacuous head. The world has changed, and you are not part of it...
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Your daughter is not anybody else's problem, it is your problem, not mine, never was, never will be. Same thing in reverse - my daughter is only my problem, has nothing to do with you and caring about her should never be forced upon you by the threat of violence.
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I just changed my mailing address with the VA. The phone call took me over an hour (had to wait a half hour on hold only to make an appointment for them to call me back later). The man informed me to change my address for any medical benefits or education benefits, I'd have to call them (was a bit vague on who "they" were..) because it's three separate databases.
WTF?! It's all the Department of Veterans Affairs! Why do they have my data stored in THREE different databases?! And why can't this guy submit t
90 Days!? (Score:2)
Re:90 Days!? (Score:5, Informative)
To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.
That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P
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To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.
That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P
which really might not be enough for some agencies to contract subcontractors for the work of creating a blog.
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This has been done before. You're over thinking it if you suggest a blog might be used. The HSPD-12 implementation status sites are most commonly a single HTML page or a single PDF document linked off an agency website.
For example, the U.S. International Trade Commission. Go to their main page at http://www.itc.gov/ [itc.gov]. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the HSPD-12 (PDF) link.
THAT is what is being mandated.
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Shit! Oh well, never mind what I said here [slashdot.org] then; it really is a boondoggle after all.
Re:90 Days!? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, as a supplement to the President's memorandum, the U.S. CTO and CIO are leading programs to stop the proliferation of .gov sites and focus on converting all the PDF and static website content into machine-readable data so public/private services can communicate create content via APIs. Your sites won't need updating if the data coming from the government is being streamed into an embedded visualization app. You'd be able to consume whatever report or graph you need in whatever form you need it in, using the scope you want.
The video for the the CTO/CIO announcement (more for the Slashdot crowd): http://fedscoop.com/video-vanroekel-park-announce-new-government-digital-strategy/ [fedscoop.com]
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For some offices that shoudn't be a problem. Some of them (or at least part of some of them) I can say with confidence no longer require IE at all, and give the users a choice of IE or Firefox (and supporting IE6 was dropped as a requirement over a year ago!).
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Election year (Score:2)
When politicians pretend to care about random voting/donating blocks of citizens, when they really could care less.
I'm all in, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
Now we're going with apps, we can make it an unskippable video describing how this is reducing paperwork instead. Go, go, government progress!
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The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper.
Maybe we're doing it backwards. Maybe if software engineers (helped) design government processes they would be more efficient.
I'm not a software engineer, but I do have that kind of logical thought process, and I know this has helped immensely in my career as I spec out business processes and design/refine the way of doing things (i.e. processing information, moving paperwork, reporting data, etc.)
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Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.
In the government: 20 man-hours gathering compet
The meat of the memo... (Score:2)
The meat of the memo is on page 16: Shift to an Enterprise-Wide Asset Management and Procurement Model
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government-strategy.pdf [whitehouse.gov]
"GSA will establish a government-wide contract vehicle for mobile devices and wireless service"
The rest of this is just window dressing.
I couldn't agree more. (Score:2)
it is time for the federal government to do more
Too bad this is completely missing the mark.
It makes me proud (Score:3, Interesting)
to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea, ...
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Maybe you can talk to Reid about moving on all the jobs bills and budgets languishing in the Senate.
Is it the fault of Sen. Reid or the fault of enough Republicans to make a filibuster?
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Then let the vote come and be done with it. How is what he doing different than the Republican's filibustering?
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Frankly, if my President is too stupid to think about more than one thing at a time, I don't much want him as my President. The rest of us have multiple "really important" things that we deal with all the time; the President should be even better at it than the average Joe.
Obfuscation (Score:2)
As scientifically minded people, we have tendency to model systems. The only model that really fits most democratic systems is extreme cynicism. The politicians may not be exclusively power- and money-driven with just about total disregard for the will of the people, but if you apply a model based on that
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To start with, creating a government website is like trying to index the contents of a land fill. So much trash in so many places.
Now, take the task that's virtually impossible with a full blown browser and make it work on a 3"x2" screen with a touch pad interface.
Yeah. All the tech people in the government have a complete WTF? look on their faces.
This seems like another make-work project (Score:3)
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love driving your mountain roads that go from nowhere to nowhere and have absolutely zero traffic for hundreds of kilometres. Certainly a beautiful way to waste money. This seems like the very same thing.
Mobile devices such as these have been around for about 5 years. That makes them new technology, especially in government circles. What's going to happen after the 90 days? Will the next order be to improve the sites to support the next big mobile browser? Oh wait, that's what this is -- wasn't it just two years ago that he ordered everybody to make their services available online in the first place?
Government's always been required to make things available to the widest audience. If everyone could access the government services from a desktop, that'd suffice. It needn't be better than functional. You don't need to pay your taxes from your shitty smart phone -- especially because 10 years from now your smart phone won't be so shitty.
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wasn't it just two years ago that he ordered everybody to make their services available online in the first place?
Yes, and a lot of them ended up implemented in Flash, Java applets, or something else that doesn't work on Safari for iOS or Android Browser for Android.
Maybe I'm not the norm (Score:2)
Optimize for mobile (Score:2)
Two key services to do first (Score:2)
One app for the left, and one app for the right.
Opti-my-diction (Score:2)
If "optimize for mobile" includes preventing zoom, they can just stop right now, thanks. Seriously, there's web design help sites where people discuss how best to stop people browsing on hand held devices from zooming in. And then they all set their font sizes to about 4 point. Evil, evil people. :-P
Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Insightful)
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More likely, he's mostly accessing internet from his smartphone, and is looking out for number one.
If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.
But as I said, he cares about number one and not the public. He's a career
Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any president would do this, regardless of party, for the same reasons Obama is: People want it, it's entirely reasonable, it's politically inoffensive, and both parties support it.
Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual specs. (Score:4, Insightful)
Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?
It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.
Accessibility (Score:5, Informative)
That's known as Section 508 compliance. In addition to basic accessibility, the law says an access board will further establish guidelines, and among them are adherence to standards and ommission of non-compliant plug-ins.
In case you want to slap a party label on it, this was introduced by Democrats during a Republican-controlled Congress and passed. The cynical (and usually right when it comes to politics) side of me says that because this was introduced by two California Democrats, one of them the rep for Silicon Valley, there was motivation to funnel money to the tech companies that would likely be haired to overhaul sites to compliance.
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Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish people would make fun of your "religion" like they do mine.
One more "religion" to add to the list, AGW, anti-AGW, Anti-Nukes, and Obama.
The OP didn't say anything that people didn't say against Bush, hell he even said something bad about Bush.
WTF are you talking about? I didn't make fun of any "religion" - unless your "religion" is one of spouting hate - the only thing I put down. If you think there aren't Obama haters out there - who will say anything no matter how ridiculous - then you must have your fingers in your ears and your your eyes closed. I don't think that this tiny detail is worth ranting against ANY president.
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The word "hate", just like "racist", has lost all meaning in today's discourse. Being diametrically opposed to someone's viewpoint is not hate. This overuse of the "hate" label is evidence of one party's inability to form a coherent argument in response the opponent. "I don't like what you said about my guy, and I'm too lazy or unable to counter your argument, so... that's hate speech."
Weak.
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The word "hate", just like "racist", has lost all meaning in today's discourse. Being diametrically opposed to someone's viewpoint is not hate. This overuse of the "hate" label is evidence of one party's inability to form a coherent argument in response the opponent. "I don't like what you said about my guy, and I'm too lazy or unable to counter your argument, so... that's hate speech." Weak.
My point was not hate as in "hate speech," but hate as in "spewing unsubstantiated claims just to put down a particular person or idea" - such as Apple Haters, Android Haters, or Microsoft Haters. The OP's post qualified as it was just an unsubstantiated spout of sarcasm with no point except to bad-mouth the president (note it was quickly down-modded to troll).
Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Funny)
Lucky for you the Republicans just happened to pick a small soap dish to run against him.
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.And I would vote for anyone but Obama if anyone wasn't enthralled by the cult of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.
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Not really. Just the "fiscally conservative" folks who claim that tax cuts for the ultra wealthy will balance the budget, educate the children and secure national security. That isn't fiscal conservatism, it is a radical attack on this nation that will bring us to our knees so that the yoke of plutocratic oppression can be placed on our shoulders. That is of course assuming the Chicoms don't take advantage of the opportunity before the plutocrats can.
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Anybody coming into office with the worst economy in over hallf a century and fighting two wars isn't going to do miricles. It took Bush eight years to raise gasoline from a buck five to four fifty, get our country attacked by ignoring the pervious President's warnings and his own FBI agents' warnings. You expected Obama to clean up the mess Bush left in half the time it took Bush to make that mess?
Obama's not a bad President. His only problem is he's not a great President. He's better than half the Presid
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After all this time, he has nothing to crow about other than "it is Bush's fault"? Ok...he got Bin Laden. Nice...however, that hunt had been put in place a long time ago.....hey, guess that was started by Bush, so, ok...he's still on that kick.
You'd think after over 3 years, Obama would be trying to run on his amazing record and accomplishments for his presidency....but no....all's quiet on that front.
[crickets chirpin
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Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash. This isn't 2001, when phones required customized web-content to display it properly. This is just a giant hand-out -- to some buddy, no doubt. Bush had Haliburton to hand sweet deals to and Obama has... whoever.
I recall that the EBS is to be retired from TV and radio, which are ubiquitous technologies, to cell phone communications, which are not. If that does happen then cell phones will become a safety necessity and more phones will have to be given out (subsidized.) More than likely, these won't be Android phones or iPhones but rather feature phones (which still exist in 2012 and still hold a large part of the market) which do not have full browsers built-in. To accommodate those phones and provide essential
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Well, you do understand that things like some AM radio stations are designated as information sources for emergencies and are required to be on the air during such emergencies, right? This means that such radio stations have to have backup power and diverse antenna systems so they really can stay on the air.
Cell phones, on the other hand, have no such requirements today. The network is pretty robust so if one cell site goes down the impact isn't all that great. But, there are no requirements for how long
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Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
Yeah, you can get it, but there are still discussions about how the iPhone's Safari screws up ordinary text. My wife has an iPhone, but doesn't use Safari much because of this. The problem, of course, is Safari's practice of formatting a text page for a window a lot bigger than the iPhone's screen, then shrinking it to fit, making the font size so tiny as to be illegible. Or you can enlarge it, but then you have to pan left and right for every line of text, making reading it a PITA.
When the first iPho
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The answer to your question is CSS3 Media Queries, which allows you to determine the viewport size and use CSS specifically designed for that viewport size.
I know this will twist your iPhone into knots, but here's a good walkthru (including iPhones and Androids) on Microsoft's site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh882445.aspx [microsoft.com]
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Thanks. I've seen references to CSS3 Media Queries, of course, but so far I haven't found a sample of code that actually does the job I described.
Actually, this one didn't quite work, either. The URL gets the response:
502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server. There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed. When the Web server (while acting as a gateway or proxy) contacted the upstream content server, it received an invalid response from the content server.
Maybe it's been slashdotted? ;-) The error messages aren't very helpful.
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It seems to be up again, just tried it. :)
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Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done. (30 days would be better, though.)
The constants above are obviously an over-generalization; the Apollo Program couldn't be done in 90 days better than in one year, though doing it in one year just might be better than doing it in ten years. But for making websites modern-touch-mobile friendly/formatted (as opposed to merely "working") setting the deadline to a few weeks is .. about right.
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Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
That's a great point. I've noticed that as well. Only objection I'd raise is that injecting a project with a short deadline causes delays in every other ongoing project as people have to stop whatever else they were working on to get this done. Of course if you happen to have people sitting around doing nothing, then you're not interrupting anything.
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90 days? Are you insane???
90 days is barely enough time to gather up some people to form a committee to pick the board to evaluate the letter head logo design contractor bids (ensuring , of course...that these contract bids being considered are ONLY from minority, female owned companies)....
What are you smoking??? Care must be done to do this correctly....the Federal Way!!
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I was smoking ObamaYesWeCan. I saw "90 days" and thought maybe he had ordered them to not do it The Federal Way.
I was wrong. Whoever modded you troll, was wrong too. Turns out there is no (real) 90 day deadline. The president isn't serious. Again.
Re:That'll go well. (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, you do understand the 90 day deadline is for the agencies to have a website that shows their progress. It isn't referring to actually getting the job done.
Where the US Gov uses SWF (Score:2)
Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
Guess what the National Weather Service's radar loops use.
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From the looks of things [weather.gov], they're nothing but animated GIFs [weather.gov].
That's only the national ones. If you use a local one, and make it animate, they use Flash. For example, the Boston area radar loop [weather.gov].
Which is actually a step up - they used to be a Java applet. The Flash version is a massive improvement. Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't be done using HTML4 (no need anything HTML5 adds), but they're not.
Re:That'll go well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes every decision the president makes has this huge political meaning...
He was probably at a meeting, and one of his aids tried to look up the data on his phone and couldn't access it because it was flash... And Obama was like. Why don't we make sure all the government websites work on mobile browsers?
When asked people they didn't come up with a good argument against the idea so he put it into practice.
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You are probably correct, but you left out a step. "When he asked people" includes some White House polling service. It was determined that X% of Dems and Y% of Repubs agree. It also show that Z% of people ages 25-35 agree, while A% of people ages 50-60 agree. After all this, it was seen as a "Good Thing" and minimal negative impact, and so it was made public.
This is how much overhead there is on something so simple and basically common sense.
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Which government agencies use Flash?
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Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
My old feature phone could show YouTube videos. You're not going to be watching any TV or listening to much radio on your iPhone without installing apps for each one, because almost all the video and radio station streams use Flash.
But my old phone won't properly display many HTML web sites because they misuse CSS; there are no scroll bars on the phone.
And WTF? Obama does something to cheer about and you still bash him! He's by n
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The former is how it should and easily can be. Sadly, between the "app" "revolution" and the lack of mention of HTML, I see more sites like m.fbi.gov [fbi.gov] in our future.
A bit more interesting to me is the "requiring agencies to use web performance analytics and customer satisfaction measurement tools on all '.gov' websites" line in the PDF release. Will those be some sort of in-house thing? Will they end up tripping Do Not Track or IE's Tracking Protection because they're sending the info to Google Analytic
That assumes the sites use CSS (Score:2)
A lot of government pages are way behind the times, and often still use tables for formatting.
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A mobile website typically has completely different usability requirements than a tablet/desktop website. People that try and pack a website into a phone shouldn't be making mobile websites. The business analyst should assume that someone on a phone is on the move and doesn't have an attention span longer than 10 secs or at most 1 min.
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> java script is not allowed anywhere ever.
this isn't the year 2000
Amount of information per page (Score:2)
Ditch the piles of eye candy and put information there and it should work fine.
The problem is that one generally wants to have more information per page on desktop than on mobile because desktop's screen is big enough to display more information.
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However, they must bring back the BLINK tag!!!
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JavaScript is required for AJAX to work. AJAX is what we're all used to and expecting these days.
You want to go back to form submits and page flashes while reloading ALL the HTML for each tiny update on a page?
You are teh dumb. Turn in your geek card. Go sit in your mama's room and suck your thumb.
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Flash is "bleeding edge"? Have you been in a coma for the past 15 years?
SWF is still the fastest way to display vector animation, and Flash is still the best-known way (with I'd guess monopoly market share) to edit vector animation. Let me know when animated SVG comes near the frame rate of SWF for a similarly complex scene. Do you want me to link you some benchmark pages with which to test?
Benchmarks of HTML, Canvas, SVG, and Flash (Score:2)
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What we need is a "Kill Switch" ...
Well, we do "power cycle" the government every 4 years (or 2 years for Congress). But when we plug it back in, we tend to power up the same power-slurping setup that we'd previously installed.
Sometimes you just need to retire the old components, and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.
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and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.
We do. The alpha sociopaths who dominate the power structure in this country are getting smarter and more successful every year.
Hope is not a strategy.