----- Original Message ----- From: Mick Maguire Subject: RE: OT: What Do You See?
> In defense of people using technologies etc only found in the latest > browsers let me just point out the obvious once again: Netscrape and IE are > available free from their respective producers... 100% free no commission no > hidden charges etc, etc. so if your "current" version of Netscape 2.0 wont > work with some manufacturer's page you really don't have a comeback. > > As somebody who writes for the web for a living, there are too many > differences in current versions of browsers to start worrying about obsolete > versions. It's your choice which browser to use period, but at least you can > rest assured that there is one constant... the web designers will be coding > for the latest couple of versions of the biggest 2 (Netscape and IE), if you > don't like these or don't want to use them then you need to cut your cloth > accordingly and put up with incompatibilities. All very well and good if you web pages are written exclusively for people with the latest technology available. When I was writing the PUG, I was very tempted to use CSS and frames, as it would have made some of the coding a lot easier. What I discovered during my market research was that many of the people who were viewing the gallery were using, by necessity, not choice, very old browsers and slow internet connections. Ask our Eastern European list members who pays for internet time by the second if they really want to do an 18mb download to get the latest Navigator browser suite. Ask them if they will be viewing the gallery if the size limit on the image is bumped to 768X1024 and 200kb filesize, just because the guy who writes it has a cable connection to the web and works with a 19" monitor and a graphics card that will support 1600x2000 pixels at 100hz. My own thought is that if you are writing a page for a known audience who has the latest and greatest, then go crazy and use whatever suits your fancy. Hell, you can even use <blink>only supported by Netscape, and not valid HTML</blink> if you can define a browser to use for page viewing. For the rest of us, who want to reach a wide audience, and have the viewer see what we wrote, the strategy needs to be different. I recall a website that was pointed out here a while back. The author had written the site with a blue font on a black background, or something equally impossible to read. I emailed her and told her that while she might have good information on the site, she wasn't making it easy to view. She replied that I should switch my browser over to user specified colours rather than page specified. Like there is some logic there. Write something that is impossible to view, then make it incumbent on the viewer to fix the issue if they want to view the site. Needless to say, I emailed her back, with one of my typically friendly missives, telling her what I thought of her ideas regarding writing web pages. I feel the same way about Java script. I choose to use Navigator because I can disable the stuff. I may miss a few dancing cockroaches, but I know that what is invoked on my computer is of my own choosing. If you write a page that requires Java to be enabled to view the site, I will simply go elsewhere. Your website doesn't mean that much to me. Anyway, thats just what I think. William Robb - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
