Posted by
Russell McOrmond-2 on
May 16, 2006; 8:42pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Re-Census-2006-statistics-tp583p596.html
On Tue, 16 May 2006, Richard Houston wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> What about making the petition for "a policy for open standers for
> Government of Canada websites and web delivered information"? We could
> site the census2006 as an example.
Unfortunately you would have an uphill battle at this point if the
government truly believes they "really really really" needed to run an
application on the citizen's computer. There is no "standard" to do this
that runs on every platform. The closest thing we have currently is the
ECMA's standardization of C# and the CLI. This makes that platform far
more appropriate than the proprietary Java and the JVM, but you are still
locking out the low and high-end (Small/older machines, and mobile devices
such as PDA's, etc) which do not run such complex language interpreters.
I don't think the online community would have been any happier if
appropriate standards would have been required for that application given
only the most recent versions of OS's have C#/CLI (Mono for Linux/etc,
.NET for Microsoft, and I have to admit I don't know what MacOS-X has for
this standard). You are still downloading an application of unknown
origins that has an undocumented task, with applications always having a
target platform that creates incompatabilities.
I think this is a bit outside of CivicAccess which is not the technical
details of how the government interacts with citizens, but the
availability to citizens of government generated information. While there
is overlap, they aren't the same.
I think the better venue for what you are looking for is GOSLING -
http://GOSLINGcommunity.org . While there is an active Ottawa chapter, we
haven't yet launched chapters in other cities and are looking for help.
--
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <
http://www.flora.ca/>
2415+ Canadians oppose Bill C-60 which protects antiquated Recording,
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