The Issues System is intended to be platform independent, and provide response rates as near as possible to those expected from locally executed software.

Response time is optimized by making the Server Engine build its user interface screens the hard way - using complex but fast HTML commands instead of the easy but slow mapped graphics many websites use.

Platform independence is accomplished by limiting the Issues Server Engine to only those HTML functions that are fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Irregular Control Sizes and Layouts

Unfortunately for the users of Microsoft products, Internet Explorer does not accurately implement the official HTML standards. Current versions of IE aren't even compatible with earlier versions of IE!

Issues is able to accommodate enough of the nonstandard "features" of IE to allow functional compatibility. However, aesthetics of the screens IE users see will be diminished because IE doesn't support some important basic formatting functions. Accomplishing these basic functions in IE would require using Microsoft's nonstandard extensions - which would degrade the experience of those using the standards compliant products of Microsoft's competitors.

Forced to choose between supporting standards compliant browsers, or perverting Issues into an extension of Microsoft's market manipulations, we have decided to support those browsers that have shown the greatest respect for the standards and their users. IE users are welcome to enhance their Issues experience by installing Netscape on their computers.

Log-In Problems

Those who insist on using IE may experience log-in problems due to IE's insistence on "reusing" HTML pages from its local cache instead of requesting a "fresh" page from the Issues Server. Sending a cached page to the Issues Engine results in an "unexpected event", and the Issues Engine has to reject unexpected events as a regrettable but necessary security measure. If your log-in is rejected, clicking on your browser's "Reload" button will force IE to get a fresh log-in page from the Issues Server.

The cache/reload problem only appears to involve the log-in page. Once you've entered the Issues System, the pages are dynamically generated by the Issues Server Engine, and are sufficiently different that IE doesn't try to substitute "used" pages from the cache. (Actually the log-in page is also dynamically generated, but how many variations can there be in the way the Issues Engine builds a log-in page?)