"...come down of our soapboxes...."? Why should we? It's only because people like
mrcross, rustle et al. were vociferous that these problems were addressed at all at AIS.
Remember: WE pay an arm & a leg for their notam etc 'service'.
The point is that this is an
operational necessesity. There shouldn't be built in restrictions of access caused by proprietary coding.
Opera - and many other browsers - is quite capable of using Java, Javascript etc etc. The argument about the site won't work doesn't wash - had it been written with open useability in mind ie standards compliant.
As we move to a greater & greater reliance on electronic access to data they will have no choice but to adhere to standards. Devices for accessing information are becoming more prevalent AND more varied. They're NOT all PCs with IE/NS.
Bear in mind that as the customer it's US that ultimately pay for this. AIS are there for US. Further down the line, AIS as the customer of Thales are the ones who get to call the tune with THEM.
Further, the govermental policy is towards online access of data. Even their current Microsoft-centric move to online data is now being criticised & reviewed due to the difficulty of ensuring full access to everyone. (Forget where I read that. BBC? Business review? It Something like that. It's been in several places anyway...)
I'm certainly not having a go at
mrcross. His efforts have been exemplary. I'm very much grateful for what he & the others have done. I shudder to think of the mess we'd be in were it not for you gentlemen.
Rather, it's the sheer incompetence of the AIS implementation that gets my goat.
I've come to think that it would be money well spent for AIS to reneg on the Thales contract, using whatever get-out clauses might be available, and buy Australia's system in-toto. The Oz one isn't perfect either, but certainly shines all over Thales' offering.
Back to the useability...
1. I can now get the site to mostly work with Opera 7. The drop down menus now work ie now allow selection from them however remain in the foreground when a menu option is not selected. The menu doesn't disappear unless a menu item is selected.
Interestingly, using Opera 6.04 I can get to the notams page but only by cutting & pasting the URL derived from another source. You can't tell me that a working drop down list is a site critical difficult problem, a change to which will require recoding the whole shebang.
Maybe Thales programmers need to re-open their books about HTML/Java/Javascript/PHP or which ever mechanism they chose to implement the lists.
2. Instead of an arbitrary +/- 4000' buffer why isn't it able to be specified? Perhaps defaulting to +/- <something> but a different buffer able to be selected eg +/-5000'? Alternatively, limiting altitudes in the full brief page can be chosen so how about cutting & pasting that bit of code?
Most pilots on a route aren't too interested in the whole of the country/FIR so using the full brief isn't appropriate. Just the route + alternates, at the levels they'll fly. BTW, who decided on 4000' & based on what criteria? If a single buffer had to be chosen I'd have gone for +/- 5000': That allows notam access for the entire airspace that most unpressurised/non-O2 equipped a/c can use. Still prefer the ability to choose the buffer amount though...
3. There needs to be an ability to update a previous briefing. That is obtain only the changes since the full breif was obtained. The system requires us to input a briefing ID and, now sensibly add date/time data to the output. A mechanism that can combine/filter/compare this information would be very useful.
4. The various icons don't seem to have some form of 'tooltip' description that is meaningful. The sort of thing that pops up as a tooltip is
Address http://www.ais.co.uk/aes/controlbrie...VF_ITEMID=EDLW|2003-04-17 00:00:00.0|V
Similarly, there needs to be a handler routine that explains what's wrong when the form won't submit due to something not filled out correctly. The case I just had turned out that it didn't like the number '1' as my chosen briefing ID. Damned if I know why.
The form wouldn't accept a mouse click on the 'submit' button, but I could get a Javascript window pop up by right clicking & selecting 'open page'. If I mouse-over'ed the button & pressed enter it dropped me back into the form without any explanation of what's wrong.