Infotech to round up ralliers

There were 200 rallies on Sunday in favor of abortion rights, around the US. Bad technology prevented me from being one of them. I saw notice of the event a few days before it, and I wanted to post to encourage people to participate — and to participate personally, if I was up to the walking and standing required.

Sad to say, the URL for finding information about the rallies was a web page that depended almost totally on nonfree JavaScript code. Without running that code, no useful information was visible in the page. As a matter of conscience, I will not accept nonfree software as normal or legitimate, so I will not suggest to the public to run a nonfree program. I had no other solution. Thus, I could not post about these rallies.

I implore groups that organize rallies to make the small effort needed to post the information in a simple HTML page accessible from the Free World — not _instead of_ what they now do, but _in addition_. The page could contain an itemized list, with a section for each state and items within a section sorted by city. That would be easy to generate, and easy for users to download and search. If organizations do this, they will enable people to find their rallies from within the Free World.

I used to know a volunteer who would set up to scrape the inaccessble pages and put the results in a non-JavaScript page. Then I could link to that scraper page to post directions to find a rally. Alas, I lost touch with per last year.

If you'd like to volunteer to do this for me, a few times a year, and you know how to do it, please send me email at gnu.org.