The Substantially Similar Weblog

I frequently email website owners when they fail to conform to w3c standards. It’s particularly a problem when the site doesn’t work at all with browsers other than Internet Explorer, since that’s not an option for me. I usually don’t expect any concrete results, but once in a while I get lucky.

Here’s a note I received from the very large online legal research company, Lexis-Nexis. Amazingly, they responded to my feedback within 24 hours:

 Dear Mr. Kessel: Thank you for sharing your input regarding lexis.com. We truly appreciate your valuable feedback. Due to notes such as yours, we have decided to comply with your request. We anticipate this change will be made within a month. Thank you again for sharing your comments and suggestions. Regards, lexis.com Product Development -----Original Message----- From: Support Mailbox [mailto:support@prod.lexis-nexis.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 4:34 PM To: research@lexisnexis.com Subject: Feedback for LexisNexis(TM) at lexis.com Date: 2/19/2003 4:33:44 PM From: Adam Kessel Email: kessel.a@neu.edu Company: Northeastern University Law School Phone: 617-xxx-xxxx Feedback: I am unable to click on any of the "tabs" with my web browser (Mozilla). Your HTML code violates w3c standards, and for no purpose! You have  anchor tags outside of your  columns tags, and they could just as well go *inside* the  and then (at least that small piece of code) would comply with web standards, and it would work with more web browsers. As things stand now, I've developed a filter that replaces all the tags so I can actually click on the tabs. Westlaw presents no such problems, though, so I am considering switching to their service. If I can be of any assistance in further clarifying or remedying this problem, please let me know. Mozilla has been downloaded millions of times, and there's no good reason not to support it, even if you don't do so officially. 

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