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Example 1: Why Doesn't Anyone Fill Out Their Tax Forms?

John Walsh lives in the country of Googolica. This country is the first in the world to require its citizens to file their taxes online. Here's the form they use:

2007 Tax Form

The Sovreign Nation of Googolica, In Search We Trust

First Name:
Last Name:
Email Address:

  1. Please Enter Your 2007 Gross Income
  2. Please enter the value from line 1. This is your 2007 tax
  3. Would you like to contribute an extra $3 to the Presidential Campaign Fund?


To the astonishment of the Googolican government, people have not been using the form. The Parliament investigated. The problem, they first thought, might be the brutal tax percentage - 100%. This theory was quickly dismissed.

The final report concluded the web page is faulty, thus discouraging it use. Among its problems:

  • It's ugly. Really ugly.
  • The form does nothing to help the user. It does not clean up mistakes. And it reports errors after the form has been submitted, leaving the user to stare at a blank form again.
  • Googolica has two official languages, English and Snobol. Snobol-speakers are out of luck. And bifurcating the page into an English and a Snobol version makes development twice as difficult.
  • People with special needs - low vision, motor problems that discourage mouse use - are out of luck.
  • MORE...

Fortunately, the Googolican IT department employs John Walsh. And John has just downloaded Dojo and Dijit. Things are looking up!

IE 7 Fails to open the "Adding Dijit" page

When I click on the link I get a dialog box that says,

Ineternet Explorer cannot opent the Internet site http://www.dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-9/part-1-life-dojo/example-1-why-doesnt-anyone-fill-out-their-tax-forms/adding-some
Operation aborted

I didn't try much to figure out what was wrong.

Rob:-]

Same problem in IE6

I see the same problem in IE6... not exactly good as it happened when I was trying to convince my boss to let us use Dojo.
Works fine in FF 2.

Please Somebody fix it.

I have the same problem with IE.
However, works fine with firefox.

Not very useful example!

This example does not inspire any confidence at all in someone looking at using this toolkit. It crashes both IE 6 and 7 with an "Operation Aborted" error. Unfortunately, support for both IE and Firefox at the very least is a number one requirement. The example should either be fixed or removed (and if there's an underlying problem in the toolkit that causes this, I sure hope that gets fixed soon!).
Why post an example on this web site that appears to have never even been tried on the most commonly used browser platform?