tech.thingoid

VicRoads has got some “On-line interactive bicycle maps of Victoria“.

Their web page says:

This mapping system provides up to date information on the location of completed bicycle routes throughout the state. The maps include details of the off-road path network and the on-road lane network in Melbourne and in regional Victoria as well as the Rail Trail network in regional Victoria.

The interactive maps allow you to:

• find information on all bicycle networks right across the entire state,
• view the maps at any scale you choose including Melways images in Melbourne,
• print maps in colour and black and white with a title block and legend,
• view the map backgrounds in colour and in black and white to accentuate the bicycle routes which are in colour,
• measure the distance of any trips planned or taken,
• search the maps using road names, suburbs and/or municipality names.

Yeah but …

Great stuff - if you can get it to work.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you whether the maps work as advertised because they don’t run on my computer. Try to load them in anything other than Internet Explorer for Windows and you’ll more than likely be told, as I was when I tried to load it under Firefox in Max OS X:

This application requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

Just plain stupid

Let’s just look at why this is so wrong:

1. Firstly, the last available version of Internet Explorer for Mac OS X is 5.2.3 and Microsoft officially ended support for this product just over a week ago, so there won’t be any new versions. By the way, this has been public knowledge for two and a half years now. So even if I wanted to (which I don’t) I couldn’t run the appropriate version of IE to view this resource.

2. Quite apart from that, various pundits (from Charles Wright to Bruce Schneier) are regularly recommending people stop using Internet Explorer. And right or wrong, people have been saying it for years.

3. Finally, the days of “this page best viewed with …” are long gone. Frankly it beggars belief that a government organisation can be making something so stunningly inaccessible when there are plenty of cross-platform, browser-independent technologies that could have done this task just as well.

Come on, lift your game VicRoads!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 2:12 pm.
This page is no longer maintained and the information above is probably out of date.

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