Standards advocacy

Yesterday, after our LexisNexis representative gave a presentation on Shephardizing cases online, myself and a friend approached him and asked why a lot of the functionality of LexisNexis breaks when you aren’t using Internet Explorer (of course, I knew the answer but I just wanted to see what he would say). Being a non-techie, he gave the expected response, something along the lines of, that’s just what they decided on; everything works fine in IE. While the answer was anticipated, the logic is still incredibly flawed. I tried to explain to him that if the powers that be would just comply with simple web standards, then their site would be fully functional across all operating systems running a compliant browser (i.e., any browser other than IE  :P). If, after those changes were made, things were to break in IE, they could point to the fact that IE is broken, not their site. As it currently stands, when someone complains about lost functionality in Firebird, Safari, Opera, or any browser other than IE, all they can say is, use IE — the ridiculousness should be apparent .