October 10, 2004

Microsoft and Immigration

Posted by Brian

This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest DS-156 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” on my defeault Firefox browser, it automatically marked “Yes” whatever I clicked. Needless to say, this is not the answer I wanted to communicate to the State Department. So I tried opening up the form in IE, and the problem goes away, i.e. it is possible to mark “No”. Nothing in the source code for the page suggests why there should be a problem here, at least to my untrained eyes. It’s just odd.

Posted on October 10, 2004 04:08 AM UTC
Comments

The other radio button fields have the tag closed. The field in question, field 35, has a tag but no end tag. MS may handle this error more elegantly than Firefox does. (I’m also using Firefox and get the same error.)

Posted by wtfwjd? · October 10, 2004 04:22 AM

So the headline should be “Immigration and buggy HTML” or “Microsoft helping me get my work done”?

Posted by Headline hunter · October 10, 2004 04:25 AM

Oops…the tag in question in my comments above is the <label> tag — silly me, I used angle brackets in my comments and so the tags were omitted from my post.

Posted by wtfwjd? · October 10, 2004 04:26 AM

I had the same problem a few weeks ago when filling in my own form. The solution is to opt for the version of the form that you don’t fill in on-line - they have an intelligent PDF that you can download, fill in, and then print out.

Posted by Henry · October 10, 2004 04:47 AM

Thanks wtfwjd. That looks like it was the problem.

I think the headline should probably be something about how untrained Brian is at HTML, but I’ll leave it as is :)

Posted by Brian Weatherson · October 10, 2004 04:49 AM

THere is a Firefox site which records external sites which have problems when run with Firefox. If you’d like the link to report this problem, pls. let me know.

Posted by Richard Silverstein · October 10, 2004 05:07 AM

Bill Gates did it

Posted by free patriot · October 10, 2004 06:25 AM

Opera seems to handle it satisfactorily.

Posted by bad Jim · October 10, 2004 06:33 AM

If Opera didn’t handle it well anyway, you’d be able to edit the cached source code, refresh display and submit the corrected form. Handy, that.

Posted by Reinder · October 10, 2004 07:59 AM

Yep, the missing close tag on </label> hurts. However, if it had a doctype, Firefox would work properly, like IE and Safari and Opera do.

Running the doc through the W3C.org validator comes up with over 200 errors. Sloppy coding, sloppy testing.

Posted by Michael · October 11, 2004 12:29 AM

The same happens in Camino (another Mozilla browser), but not in Safari (KHTML based rendering).

Posted by Yusuf Smith · October 11, 2004 09:57 AM

The same happens in Camino (another Mozilla browser), but not in Safari (KHTML based rendering).

Posted by Yusuf Smith · October 11, 2004 09:58 AM
Followups

→ Microsoft and Immigration.
Excerpt: This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest DS-156 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” ...Read more at Thoughts Arguments and Rants

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.