My point on standard HTML and the upcoming XML was that the WWW should be for
information rather than glitz. Maybe the webmasters who create those fancy
image-laden pages have a fast Pentium or Athlon with a LAN connection? All
those images on ZDNet fall on blind eyes when I use Lynx to speed past the
images. A web page should not be designed to force computer users to keep up
with the latest hot air. Web pages should be "best viewed with any browser"
(http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign or http://www.cast.org/bobby). There are
people with disabilities who can't use the latest frills even if they have money
to burn.
Web sites like cnn.com, about.com and www.zdnet.com, among others, have a lot of
extra stuff, not necessarily bad, except that putting that fluff on every page
means a lot of extra stuff to download redundantly. It is annoying when a story
goes to multiple pages and I have to redownload that fluff again each time.
Arachne is still somewhat slow with graphics, though 1.61 is an improvement over
previous versions. Arachne seems twice as fast under DR-DOS 7.03, where
http://ens.lycos.com takes about 80 seconds, as under OS/2 Warp 4 VDM. But
Arachne is much more advanced than IBM Web Explorer for OS/2, which even IBM
abandoned in favor of Netscape Communicator. While the weather pages linked
from http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/textversion/main.html load much faster than
the environment news pages at http://ens.lycos.com, I noticed some slowness when
running in OS/2 Warp 4 VDM compared to DR-DOS 7.03. Trying under MS-DOS 6.22,
Arachne wouldn't load at all due to insufficient low memory.
To L.D. Best regarding C compiler for Linux: you don't have to ask Mix. Linux
distributions, as well as the BSDs, come with GNU C and C++ compilers, and you
can also get Pascal, Fortran and some others, but no Cobol or RPG that I can
find. What you pay big money for with IBM (Devcon) or MS (MSDN) is available
for Linux or *BSD for just the cost of putting together those CDs.
What good software is there for Usenet? Were you referring to DOS?
