[Wylug-discuss] Natwest online banking SUCCESS!

[Smylers]

Dave Fisher writes:

> Most people who expect to continue depend indefinitely on MS-Windows
> programs for core activities should not bother with Wine or Linux at
> all.

I think that's overstating the case, as it implies that everybody who
has at least one core Windows app should never run Linux.  There are
people who have Linux core apps (such as development) and Windows core
apps (corporate groupware client) for whom 'Wine' is an excellent
solution: while their Windows apps do not run as nicely as they would on
Windows, 'Wine' at least enables them to use Linux for their work while
still meeting organizational requirements for employees to use
particular Windows applications for some tasks.

> ... people who want to use Natwest banking on Linux are most to
> achieve long term success by persuading Natwest/RBOS to follow WC3 web
> standards.

Or by persuading the W3C to standardize the practice that Natwest have
already adopted -- which also results in Natwest's website being
standards-compliant, but by different means.

> This is an entirely winnable argument, ...

No it isn't: there is currently no standards-compliant way of getting
the behaviour that is provided by the nonstandard autocomplete="off"
attribute on <input> elements.  Financial institutions are insisting on
this behaviour, and it's pointless -- and possibly harmful -- for
advocates of standards compliance to claim that following standards
solves all their problems in this particular situation.

> ... because it plays to the economic self-interest of site owners in
> so many different ways.
>
> Most immediately, it eliminates the costly requirement to code for
> different versions of the dominant IE browser, i.e. you don't have to
> plead for support based on the hypothetical growth of alternative
> (minority) platforms.

Financial organizations insisting on autocomplete="off" are not
(necessarily[*0]) writing browser-specific versions of their websites.
They could well have pages that work fine on all browsers, but they are
specifically sniffing users' browsers and only permitting entry to
people using those which are known to implement autocomplete="off".  A
policy decision to ban browsers that don't implement this security
feature is entirely different from the case where technical ineptitude
(often misuse of JavaScript) leads to sites that plain don't work in
many browsers.

  [*0]  Of course they may be doing this as well -- in which case they
  _are_ being silly and should be persuaded to stop.  But the two cases
  are unrelated, in that either can exist without t'other.

The autocomplete attribute is a _de facto_ standard, in that those
browsers which implement it are in agreement about what it does.  It'd
be good for this to become an 'official' standard, but changes to HTML
specs don't happen quickly ...

Smylers