BankWest (was: Re: [plug] Standards)

[Leon Brooks]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 18:26, Harry wrote:

Dear Meath^WBankWest Support,

> Thank you for your email re logging on to BOB.  We have noticed that
> you are using an unsupported browser, here are the most common
> browsers that are used on our website.

> _	Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 can be downloaded from Microsoft on
>       the below link

> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=[string of
> random hex]&DisplayLang=en 

> _	Internet Explorer 6 SP1 can be downloaded from Microsoft on
>       the below link

> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=[string of
> random hex]&displaylang=en 

[note the differing case for DisplayLang]

> Once you use these supported browsers you should not experience these
> issues.  If you have any further problems, please call our Customer
> Help Centre on 13 17 18.

Unfortuntely, for security reasons we cannot use Internet Explorer. In 
addition to this, no version of Internet Explorer is capable of running 
on my workstation.

We are also wondering about the true security consciousness of a bank 
which *requires* us to use browser technology which not only has a 
terrible security record but which we are unable to audit or 
self-repair.

Finally, your bank's pages break numerous Internet standards, as can be 
readily seen by submitting any of them to the W3C's HTML validator. 
Your newsroom page does not even identify itself properly, and when I 
submit it for validation with the most generous/uncritical settings, it 
produces no less than 35 compliance violations plus two error messages 
from the validator itself (something I've never seen before):

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bankwest.com.au%2Fnewsroom%2F&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&charset=iso-8859-1

Validating your CSS (stylesheets) produces another string of errors. 
Repairing these files to the point where the validator even understands 
them would almost certainly expose still more underlying errors.

Please bring your website into line with Internet standards, and your 
security into line with realistically acceptable financial industry 
minima.

[ Harry, can I please have an email address to send a slightly
  politer version of this to? I think they deserve a few FOADs of
  their own. I sat next to a BankWest manager on Saturday evening,
  and could have had a lot more interesting conversation with him
  with this in hand. ]

Cheers; Leon