Site updates

Chris Bates C.D.Bates at SHU.AC.UK
Thu Oct 24 05:22:52 EDT 1996


Star_Rats wrote:

> >"Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a
> >Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when
> >you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
> >computer, another word processor, or another network."
>
>
> I've double checked and double checked and there is nothing wrong with the
> Javascript syntax that is on the pages. I have had numerous comments about
> this and all from I/Explorer users.  It has always been a pretty standard
> thing to mention which browser has been used to test the pages of a site
> with (at least I don't put a 'choose your browser' page as the home page, as
> many do), and I think the above quote is a litle unfair in this day and age
> when every browser supports different tags and versions of their own script
> language.

You snipped the attribution from that quote. Tim Berners-Lee, for it
was he, invented the idea of WWW as way of linking hypertext documents
and so, whilst this doesn't necessarily give him extra authority, he
has probably put more time and effort into thinking about WWW than you
or I. What he is saying is simply that the point of WWW is that it
enables both hypertext and platform independance, and hence to achieve
this goal any hypertext document linked using the HTML protocol (aka WWW
site) should be capable of being accessed in some form by the maximum
number of readers. You state that every browser supports different tags
etc, well not really. All browsers will view a text-only version of a
site if that text is HTML compliant, where they fail is when accessing
non-standard items such as java, javascript, the micro$oft extensions to
HTML, blink (why for pitys sake?). Site designers must therefore decide
on the trade-off between being *modern* or being generally accessible.
Most just use everything fancy that they can then blame us, the browsing
public, if we can't read their site!!!

> Sorry for the problems guys, just trying to make a good page - anyone want a
> 'text only' version?

Yes.


Chris Bates



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