Sometime Today, Ranjan Grover assembled some asciibets to say:
> Well text is easier to render. Tables and frames are pretty sucky in
> lynx.
Lynx was never meant to have table support; in fact the w3c recommends
using divs instead of tables.
> I guess it's not the intent of the web designer for u to see the page
> in plain text.
The W3C also has a huge document explaining about accessibility and
graceful degradation. It is recommended that web designers make their
pages accessible to people with disabilities (You try clicking through a
page with a pencil in your mouth, or figuring out that a new window has
just popped up when you can't see a thing.)
It also mentions that pages should be built to degrade gracefully on
older or text based browsers. Note that it specifically mentions text
based browsers.
Something like this is totally not recommended:
<body bgcolor="black">
<font color="white">
Hello
</font>
</body>
On older browsers this would show up as a black page because there is no
font color attr. On even older browsers, this would show up as a white
page because there was no bgcolor attribute.
Using font color also means that someone who is colour blind will have
trouble. Both Netscape and IE force the user to see in the font color
even if they have chosen to override document specified colours (This only
overrides bgcolor and text attrs in the body tag).
> i never heard of any javascripts that can create any problems. Yield
> some error messages yes. If it's java that you're referring to, well
> you're just going against progress. About the virus from attachments,
A few things about client side scripting (javascript in particular).
1. I have seen many web sites where the only validations for forms were
client side javascripts. It's very simple to enter a thousand invalid
records into these databases.
2. Javascript increases the page size heavily. Generally, you should
separate your content (HTML) from layout (CSS) from functions (JS) and
put them into separate files. That makes it easier for others to parse
through and debug your files.
3. Most javascripts are unnecessary. Ban marquees in the status bar. I
want to see what my status messages are. Then there are those that do
nothing more than flip through images. That's cool if you want a slide
show, but not if you're trying to simulate an animated gif.
About java:
What do most java enabled sites do with their applets?
1. Put in a marquee because the Microsoft marquee tag is not part of html.
2. Display dynamic menus.
3. Have completely interactive forms.
If you find that most sites would answer 1 to that question, then it's
overkill. Starting up the jvm takes too much time. I may not even want
to see that page but I've gotta wait till the jvm starts.
If it's 2 or 3, then we need java and 1 is not a reason to ban it. Just
ban those sites.
I'd love to go on and advocate the use of open standards and anti
proprietising, but I think we'll leave that to the discussion.
Philip
--
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
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