M8INTERNET

I seem to be getting an increasing number of enquiries from my customers about this
People who have the latest laptops or PCs, running Windows Vista are shipped without Outlook Express, Outlook, Office, or Works

As a result when a visitor clicks on a link to a DOC, XLS, or mailto: link they are met by a "No application available" message

This is easy enough for us to sort out as host and designers, but what about the amateur website designer?
What measures should they put in place, as providing all the available types can be time consuming and costly?

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m8internet.com

fov

DOC - Use PDF
XLS PDF or dont
mailto: A form
Provide a link to Adobe reader if you are feeling extravagant...

At the end of the day if they dont have a program installed to use the documents what can you do?

M8INTERNET

I normally offer DOC or RTF, as RTF is the alternative format

XLS doesn't have an alternative, I offer a link to download Excel Viewer

mailto: is a difficult one as some people don't have any type of server that can support a form
Visitors normally get round this by copy /pasting the email address into their webmail which is open at the time

Microsoft really didn't think about this when designing Windows Vista with IE7
I couldn't understand what people were moaning about, until I tried it on a few, and it's a horrendous problem and issue
It will probably get worse when the next version of Windows comes out

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m8internet.com

fov

Bring them out of the 90s then!
Hosting can be bought for less than a 1/2 a pint of beer a month...
Im still failing to see the severity of the issue here?

M8INTERNET

Look at it from the visitors point of view
With so many laptops and PCs being sold NOW, I can see thousands of support requests being made across the industry "visitor unable to use link"

I do agree that updating mailto: with a form is easy enough, but for hundreds of amateur website owners this won't be an option
At the moment I believe most people simply copy/paste the email address, hardly 1990s more like 00's, and it can only get worse!

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m8internet.com

othellotech

Maybe it will help keep some of the monkeys and muppets offline

Ok, seriously I ant see it as a problem, I cant think of a single site I've ever visited where I'd have seen or wanted to click on a link to an excel spreadsheet ...

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Karl

Same, with the exception of some provider extranets where pricing is in excel sheets (due to the number of options etc.) - but then I know it's going to be in that format and it's the format I'd want it in anyway (makes it easier to tie in to our own sheets). At the end of the day, if a user can't open it, then that's the users fault, there's only so much you can do. It does annoy me to see .doc files as the only offering though, when PDF would be far better suited in 90% of cases.

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burble

If the content isn't worth putting on in correctly-formatted HTML, then it's usually not worth putting on at all. But sometimes it is unavoidable, and when I do have to put a doc file online, I'll convert it to a pdf with something like PDFCreator. XLS is far rarer, and almost always goes to html, or a bespoke web app.

As for mail forms, fair enough if they can't grasp the mind-boggling complexities of <form> and mail(), but if they really can't figure out how to upload a generic php form script, I guess you could tell them to set up an account at somewhere like wufoo.

But to be blunt, if an amateur is incapable of figuring out this sort of thing, then either their website doesn't matter to them enough to invest the appropriate time, or they should be paying someone competent to do it for them. Either way, I'm glad I don't run a hosting company having to deal with the kind of idiots you're describing.