On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, James Clark wrote:
On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 04:00:31PM +1200, Lindsay Druett wrote:
He's a little bit behind :) A huge portion of our servers deployed are running Linux.
The next step for Waikto Uni is to fix their site can be used with browsers other than IE.
I would be interested to know what web sites don't work. I use a number of Waikato websites, both internal and external on a day to day basis using Mozilla. The computer science department recommends that all students and staff use only Firefox as their browser and as such you should find no problems with CS sites with Mozilla. Management's MyWeb portal recently had an upgrade which caused Firefox to break. After reporting this it was very quickly fixed. I think if you politely report problems to the correct places you will find many developers inside the Uni are perfectly happy supporting Firefox.
Then to knock out mandated .doc and .xls assignment submissions. These things hinder Linux acceptance among otherwise willing students.
This is a department dependent issue. In CS as many staff and students use a selection of Linux, Windows and MacOS X so most staff encourage students to submit in .pdf, .html or plain text. If staff in a given department only have access to a windows PC and students are only provided a windows lab, then the school may well require submissions in an Office format.
These are pet peeves of mine, as my missus can't drop IE/Windows completely since she still needs them to do University work.
While I believe that .pdf is a better format to allow than .doc, I can see reasons that some schools will require things such as .xls. I believe that Management actually do some automated marking of spreadsheets which will be very tied to using Office macros etc. As such I don't think it's such a clean cut thing for them to just switch to open standards for submission overnight. Jamie