FEMA requires Internet Explorer

Following up on the Copyright Office's proposal to have copyright registration limited to Internet Explorer (IE) users (see What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information [1]), we have news today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is doing something similar:

• The Online registration requires Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 or above [2]

IE version 6 is only available for Microsoft Windows and has problems of standards compatibility. More information here:

• FEMA requires IE 6 and JavaScript [3]. "I tried the latest Safari, IE and Firefox, none work. Heaven help all the Mac users in the South...."

As government information moves increasingly from documents to transactions and government web-sites become "e-government" sites where every individual user gets different information, the importance of standards-based web sites and usability becomes more and more important.