$ thought | blog

IRCTC is an online railway reservation portal. I always admired the functionality provided by this portal. It simplified life of millions of people by providing very prompt and efficient services in ticket booking and information. From technical perspective, this is really amazing; how they are knitting all the reservation information and maintaining speed of operation as well. I was always fan of this site, until the black day arrived two days back.

I occasionally travel by train. Most of the times, I take benefit of online ticket booking services from IRCTC. I was surprised by the fresh look of the site. I wasn’t knowing that enlightenment was about to end after I logged in the portal. I couldn’t see the reservation form at all! I thought, something is wrong in the server or network and somehow page is not loaded completely. I investigated a little bit and came to know that, the portal is not designed to work with non-IE browsers. I had to reboot machine to Windows and book the ticket but that was very disappointing exercise in all.

This happened because they designed site for only IE browsers. This is the problem I always wanted to hightlight through my previous posts like this and this.

I have already dropped a letter to concerned officials requesting Non-IE compatible website and waiting for response. Government and Public services portals should be designed very carefully considering there might be consumers of those services from every corner of the country. Everybody might be using different software to access those services and it is not impossible to cater all of them. Just follow Standards (...and stick to them)!

I read today about new protocol for reading and writing data on web. Google has put the client libraries and other information on their website. I really appreciate the style of Google for providing open standards as well open application interfaces. We all know that Google earns a huge amount of money from their Ad programs but still, they are doing many things for free. Their every effort to make the web better place is clearly visible. Take example of their vast range of applications, (Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Reader, Suggest, Maps...) all applications are wonderful and I love them. Undoubtedly they brought the Ajax wave to mass. Many people were using XMLhttp before Google too, but it was not to masses, Google not only made it visible but they demonstrated how you can really simplify the applications!

Similar things should happen for quite long from now. We need help from giants on the web. They need to help building and realizing the open standards so that Web 2.0 and subsequent versions of it will be much more powerful than anybody has seen or imagined!