On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Clarence Verge wrote:
> My comments on the new Arachne home page:
>
> Aside from the fact that it is ugly, and takes forever to load in Netscape,
> it is apparantly assembled from broken HTML and has an important link missing.
>
> The top horizontal section of the "pipe" is broken at the start and it seems
> that the end section and middle section are swapped.
Maybe in Netscape 2.2 it is broken, it doesn't support <TD BACKGROUND...>
tag.... ;-)
> The letters Ara appear first on what seems to be a "pipe" END and then the
> letters "ne Labs" follow on what seems to be the "pipe" MIDDLE as it has flat
> ends. The letters "ch" are missing or invisible.
I don't observe such behaviour in any of my web browsers... strange...
> Another horizontal section lower down the page is broken and contains some
> meaningless graphic pieces which seem to hide invisible links.
> There is no text visible in this area.
>
> The most important point is there is NO DOWNLOAD LINK !!
It is there - there is link to Arachne WWW browser homepage, which is just
one of Arachne Labs products...
> I had a hell of a time getting to the download site.
>
> There is also no link to Arachne Chat.
It is there, but it is not text only link, unless you swith to text mode
version of the page.
You can bookmark "browser.arachne.cz" page, if you don't like Arachne Labs
homepage with company info and info about our other products. And you can
bookmark http://browser.arachne.cz/text_index.shtml" if you want to get
better download times...
> I just tried the home page with Arachne 1.61 on a P90 with a 56k modem.
>
> Arachne's own clock says that page took 2 minutes and 21 sec to load.
> That's just plain 100% insane !
There is text-only version of this page available. But Arachne Labs really
couldn't forever live with plain text homepage of the same old design. New
homepage look like what web pages of today are supposed to look like, and
the fact that it looks slightly slightly weird in old browsers should
encourage people to view Arachne as modern browser, not as one of those
first-generation browsers...
> The page looks VERY different in Arachne.
> I can only assume that the designer only tested with Arachne.
Arachne 1.6x, Netscape 4.7, MSIE 5.I-don-care, Netscape 6.0 (Mozilla),
and of course Lynx ;-)
I am sorry, but I am not memeber of Netscape 2.x fan club. Maybe it is
faster, and smaller, ok, but for example <TD BACKGROUND> tag was something
which was on my wish list long before it was actualy incorporated to
Netscape 4.x series...
Our goal was to show, that Arachne is really Netscape compatible. This is
reason why this page layout was 1) not designed by me, but with webmaster
with differen HTML formatting habbits 2) it originaly looked terribly in
Arachne 1.5x, and it took me quite a long time to make Arachne 1.6x
compatible with this page. But it helped a lot: as a result, Arachne
1.6x is able to display much more different and very complex pages
correctly, than it was able ever before. But I knew some users will
complain (namely Caverge, and also L.D.Best, because she complains about
everything ;-) I wouldn't like her to be my mother-in-law, really ;-).
This is why I 3) asked designer of this page, to create text only version,
which can be generated by running simple script on our server. The
text-only version is not yet perfect, and I am sure it will become
prefered for many Arachne users. If you wish, I can further work on layout
and design of text-only version; in fact, I wanted to add some ARACHNE.CFG
variable, which would select if XCH button should take you to arachne.cz
or to arachne.cz/text_index.shtml - I think that this will be default for
"slowpc.acf" profile...
And BTW, graphical page still need some tuning to look good even if images
are not loaded, you are right...
--
http://arachne.cz/
(Arachne WWW browser for DOS+Linux / Webhosting / MP3streaming)
