A Note on Reading aspx Hearing Reports from the Louisiana Attorney Discipline Board
Mike Frisch has helpfully cataloged many instances on this site of state bars or their disciplinary authorities making it easier on people to see reports and read them. Or he has nicely ragged on ones that make it hard for no reason. Recently I have had more and more trouble reading the hearing committee reports and disciplinary board opinions from the website of the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board, ladb.org. I don’t think it’s intentional on their part (they have been a really good souce of information in the past and don’t seem to try to hide disciplinary information), and they may open easily on many attorneys’ computers, but they don’t open easily on mine. They used to download in a PDF format. Now they seem to default to opening on the website’s own page instead of getting downloaded (and on mine that just freezes my computer). And if you do download it, it saves in a format ending in .aspx. At least on my computer, that opens as garbled data.
I searched on the internet and found that .aspx is an executable file format that one should be wary to open. I guess opening it within the board’s website “viewer” pane is not a problem (if you can get it do that), but once it is downloaded it does look scary to me. But I also read that one can change the file extension from .aspx to .pdf and that new file can then be opened as a regular PDF. I did that and it worked. That of course would be the same procedure one would use to easily read a downloaded report from this site linked from the Louisiana site, since it would likely be “saved as” to the .aspx extension, assuming that just clicking on the link from our blurb does not work.
An appeal to LADB: could you just go back to having the files saved as PDFs? I think this is probably a case where the tech consultants made the site needlessly complicated and assume everyone has on their computers the same opening-up programs as they do. Well, everyone does have a PDF reader. And no one is too scared of just opening up a non-executable simple PDF.
One internet sites tells me: “If you’ve downloaded an ASPX file and expected it to contain information (like a document or other saved data), it’s likely that something is wrong with the website and instead of generating usable information, it provided this server-side file instead.” That is exactly what happens with me: when I download the file offered at ladb.org, it arrives as an .aspx file and not “usable information” until I change it to a PDF. Please, ladb, fix the “something is wrong” part?
UPDATE: The site works fine in IE and Chrome browsers. I mean, fine in the sense that you can download a PDF after viewing it in their viewing pane. Personally, I prefer not to have a site open up docs and the like for viewing just by clicking on the Respondent’s name. But I recognize that there’s no technological error in having it do that. I just like to be asked first whether it does something on my computer. But I can’t say LADB is doing anything awful by going ahead and executing a script in a viewing pane by my clicking on the name of a Respondent. It just presents it as a view to the reader. I am not a big fan of that way of doing that, or not asking first whether one wants to have something run on my computer. So I admit I like PDFs as the main presentation. But this way certainly does allow PDFs to be downloaded in these two browsers, at least, and also in some people’s Firefox (though not mine).
[Alan Childress]