Re: [Patents] epoline file inspection not working

[Roland Orre <orre@nada.kth.se>]

I intended to use the http://www.epoline.org in my reference list on the
web, but I would find it embarrasing to reference information which may
not be accessable for certain people because it's made browser
dependent. This showing that I'm ignorant about the fact that those who
provide the information have not put effort into finding serious web
developers or have not clearly communicated their policy or the
importance of the service they provide to their web developers.

Most often, when some html code is not working in the browser I'm using,
I consider the information provided is not important for me. However, in
a case earlier when the access to the my company's bank account stopped
working then I got furious because I'm dependent on the service they
provide. My bank's web site had worked for many years until they
suddenly had changed something two years ago and a pop up window told me
that "I'm running the wrong operative system" (!?) (How about that,
platform dependent checks in platform independent code...?) I spent a
lot of time with them, threating to change bank if they didn't fix it.
It took me almost two weeks of phone calls and mails (and they had
several internal meetings) before they finally had cleared up the
situation and the web site was working again.

It's especially scary when reading Gerben Gieling's comment. Gerben was
involved in the original EPO web code, and clearly Gerben is a serious
developer who made the code browser independent. But later, when he
was not involved any longer, the code was changed to become browser
dependent.

How can a public service organization like EPO defend such a move?

>From my point of view it shows a mix of ignorance and naivity about
the service being provided. 

        Best regards
        Roland Orre

PS. I may use the http://www.epoline.org in my reference list anyway,
but I'll add a *Warning* telling that the link may not work with all
browsers. OK, I would never do this if the link was only working in
Internet Explorer, but as the link works OK with e.g. Mozilla, which
is the platform independent browser I'm mainly using, then I can
use the link, otherwise it would be too offending to people.


On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 16:04, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> At 
> 
>         http://www.epoline.org/
> 
> one can supposedly inspect the current state of an EPO patent.
> 
> Unfortunately I was, after a few attempts, not able to do this with
> any patent, and at
> 
>         http://www.epoline.org/epoline/pfifaq.html
> 
> I find an FAQ which teaches me that I have to use the Microsoft
> operating system platform with specific browsers that use specific
> versions of the Java Virtual Machine.  I of course use none of these
> but browsers like Konqueror, Opera and Lynx.
> 
> If the EPO's goal is to make information publicly accessible, why
> can't you keep things simple and adhere to publicly specified
> standards, such as HTML 4.0 (see www.w3c.org) ?
> 
> Meanwhile the problem about which I was complaining this morning seems
> to have been fixed, but the observation remains that espacenet.com
> could have been made more transparent and robust.  Since epoline.org
> is still in the beta phase, perhaps some bad design decisions of
> espacenet.com could be avoided rather than repeated in even worse
> form.
> 
> Btw, is intprop-l at topica com still operating ?
> My postings didn't seem to arrive there and I received only one
> mailing from AHH this year.
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