Anyone tried the Online Passport application system?

On Apr 1, 2008, at 9:23 AM, David Emery wrote:
> It didn't load at all in Safari, and when I suffered through some
> really
> poorly defined forms, I finally got to the "prepare the form" step,
> pressed the button, and -nothing happened-. (Apparently it was
> supposed
> to create a PDF form.)

The form worked for me in early May 2007 (for a renewal). I'm almost
certain I used the then-current Safari rather than giving in and using
Firefox, and I definitely didn't use Windows.

   --John

At 09:23 -0700 2008.04.01, David Emery wrote:
>It didn't load at all in Safari, and when I suffered through some really
>poorly defined forms, I finally got to the "prepare the form" step,
>pressed the button, and -nothing happened-. (Apparently it was supposed
>to create a PDF form.)

I did, about a year ago, in Firefox; no problems. It produced PDF files.

Art Evans

I did just last week, with Safari 3.1--spent about fifteen minutes entering data in the wizard and then ... nothing. No pdf was produced, or anything else. It was a big waste of time, and I wished there'd been a warning to Mac users.

One of my on-site techs had the same problem with a client running the latest version of Tiger and tried both FireFox and Safari with no luck. He was forced to boot XP in VM Ware on his MacBook Pro and use Explorer. Seemed to be the only way it would finish the process.

I intended to mention that this was just about a week or so ago, the very end of March.

cheers,

Mick

I did not try your specific web page, but I often find that I have a problem in Safari with MANY on-web-page scripts or server action features. I suspect a problem with Safari's interpretation of java, but I am not sure of that.

I like Safari, but when I run into this kind of problem, I simply paste the problem page address into Firefox and 9 times out of 10 - it works fine. Safari seems to have been this way forever, and I can't understand why Apple doesn't fix it!

On Apr 19, 2008, at 3:58 AM, Kent Green wrote:

> I did not try your specific web page, but I often find that I have a
> problem in Safari with MANY on-web-page scripts or server action
> features. I suspect a problem with Safari's interpretation of java,
> but I am not sure of that.
>
> I like Safari, but when I run into this kind of problem, I simply
> paste the problem page address into Firefox and 9 times out of 10 -
> it works fine. Safari seems to have been this way forever, and I
> can't understand why Apple doesn't fix it!


This is even easier to do in Safari 3.x. If you implement the Develop
menu (from the Advanced Preference), the first item. 'Open Page With',
presents a drop-down list of the browsers installed on the machine.
When you select one, it will be used to open the current page.



Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

Kent Green wrote:

I did not try your specific web page, but I often find that I have a problem in Safari with MANY on-web-page scripts or server action features. I suspect a problem with Safari's interpretation of java, but I am not sure of that.

That is highly unlikely. Most web pages don't use Java at all. If there's an issue with web pages not working in Safari, in most cases it's either a problem with JavaScript (which, apart from the name, has almost nothing in common with Java) or HTML/CSS.

I like Safari, but when I run into this kind of problem, I simply paste the problem page address into Firefox and 9 times out of 10 - it works fine. Safari seems to have been this way forever, and I can't understand why Apple doesn't fix it!

But Apple does fix it. What you must understand is that there is no single issue which prevents Safari from working perfectly well with all web pages. There are tens of thousands of little differences between how Safari interprets JavaScript, HTML and CSS, how Firefox interprets these things, and how different versions of Internet Explorer interpret them. If web sites are coded to work in Internet Explorer and then not tested in Safari (or Firefox, for that matter), they may not work in Safari. In order for Apple to get these sites to work, they often have to go as far as emulating specific bugs in Internet Explorer's rendering engine, which is a pita.

Apple is constantly working on improving Safari's standards compliance (which is, in fact, is already much better than Internet Explorer's). You can read about ongoing Safari development on the Surfin' Safari blog: <http://webkit.org/blog/> Finally, If you find a web site which doesn't work in Safari, select the "Safari -> Report Bugs to Apple" menu item and let Apple know.

On Apr 20, 2008, at 5:59 AM, Alan Forkosh wrote:

> This is even easier to do in Safari 3.x. If you implement the Develop
> menu (from the Advanced Preference), the first item. 'Open Page With',
> presents a drop-down list of the browsers installed on the machine.
> When you select one, it will be used to open the current page.

Very nice. Thanks. Although exactly why I would want to open <http://db.tidbits.com/
 > in RealPlayer isn't clear.

Time to do some cleaning up, I guess (I didn't know I had RealPlayer
on this machine, and it's almost certainly out of date.

   --John

On Apr 20, 2008, at 5:59 AM, Lukas Mathis wrote:

> But Apple does fix it. What you must understand is that there is no
> single issue which prevents Safari from working perfectly well with
> all web pages. There are tens of thousands of little differences
> between how Safari interprets JavaScript, HTML and CSS, how Firefox
> interprets these things, and how different versions of Internet
> Explorer interpret them. If web sites are coded to work in Internet
> Explorer and then not tested in Safari (or Firefox, for that
> matter), they may not work in Safari. In order for Apple to get
> these sites to work, they often have to go as far as emulating
> specific bugs in Internet Explorer's rendering engine, which is a
> pita.

Over time, the advent of MS IE 8 will help some here.

Of course, "over time" means about a decade, and I'm unlikely to be
around to see it happen.

The main connection between Java and Javascript is that Netscape was
trying to hitch a ride on the huge wave of Java hype, and renamed
their scripting thing accordingly. (Had they paid as much attention
to security as Sun did with Java, the web would be a much safer place
today. But Netscape missed that little detail.)

   --John

I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one with problems. I visited the Online Passport page on 5/2/08 and entered passport data in Firefox (both 1.5 and 2.0) but clicking on the "Create Form" button produced absolutely nothing. I uselessly repeated the tedious procedure three times. I wrote messages to the webmaster but haven't heard back.

At 2:42 AM -0700 5/6/08, Apta wrote:
>I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one with problems. I visited the
>Online Passport page on 5/2/08 and entered passport data in Firefox
>(both 1.5 and 2.0) but clicking on the "Create Form" button produced
>absolutely nothing. I uselessly repeated the tedious procedure three
>times. I wrote messages to the webmaster but haven't heard back.

For several years from the mid-late 90s to at least the early-mid
2000s most US Govt websites were written for Internet Explorer for
Windows. Many of them displayed badges for this. I'm pretty certain I
remember State being one of these agencies. And while the badge is
gone, the legacy code may linger on.

I did email the web master.

his reply: Site is optimized for Internet Explorer and there are no
plans to to make the site compatible with other browsers.

Lee

i'm pretty sure i applied for my renewal passport online.


nicky

On May 7, 2008, at 5:04 PM, Richard C Jones wrote:

> To get Safari to display it's Develop Menu you'll first need to
> enter the Unix command
>
> "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1" (without the
> quotation marks) into Terminal, which sits in your
> Applications>Utilities folder.

Or you can, in sufficiently recent Safari versions (I don't know how
far back from 3.1.1) check the "Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar checkbox
in the Advanced pane of Safari's preferences.

However, if the State Dept site doesn't work because it uses Active X,
lying about your browser won't help.

   --John

Posted by: richardcjones Date: May 7, 2008. > Have you tried making Safari impersonate Internet Explorer via User Agent (available in Safari's Develop menu)..... Thanks for asking.... I did. It did NOT work.... Just got the spinning beach-ball. Waited over 30 minutes (had errand to run.) I always try. Rarely works. The US Gov't's IRS web site for example that gives you the update on your tax refund does not work with Safari, but does with firefox. If I emulate firefox using the deveop menu, it still will not load. Go figure. lee

At 3:51 AM -0700 5/9/08, LA Licata wrote:

>... The US Gov't's IRS web site for example that gives you the
>update on your tax refund does not work with Safari, but does with
>firefox. If I emulate firefox using the deveop menu, it still will
>not load.

The difference is in the JavaScript implementation. I have found many
sites that will not work on Safari, but work perfectly with FireFox.
--
Roger
Lovettsville, VA

--On 5/9/08 3:51 AM -0700 LA Licata wrote:

> The US Gov't's IRS web site for example that gives you the
> update on your tax refund does not work with Safari, but does with firefox.
> If I emulate firefox using the deveop menu, it still will not load. Go
> figure.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what the develop menu item does.
Choosing a different user agent does NOT change the way Safari reads/renders
pages or "emulate" another browser--it only changes the way Safari identifies
itself to a server.

If there is a site which changes its behavior based on the identity of the
browser, or which refuses to even show you the content if you're coming from an
"unapproved" browser, then changing the user agent will make it send your
browser the same data it would send to the browser you're impersonating, and
will stop it from keeping you completely out based on your browser.

However, if something in the scripting code is not working with Safari,
changing the user agent will do nothing to resolve the problem.

Dave Scocca