On 7/25/05, Manuel Viet <oly@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Really nice ; in case you care, it displays very well in Mozilla and Konqueror
> (Linux station). Just for the sake of finding something to criticize, I
> regret that it doesn't really work with a text-based browser (lynx, links).
> The site does work better than most, in fact, but you can't grab pictures to
> display in a separate viewer, which I often do, because they're trapped in
> php. Admittedly, it may be a concern for 0.0001 % of the web-surfers (but
> that's enough to lose that "whatever you wished" compliance sticker).
I'm glad that someone else mentioned compatibility with Lynx (or other
text-only browsers). My first job that involved doing any serious web
work was at a local community network and at the time our dial-up
access only offered Lynx (you dialed in with a terminal emulator, no
ppp connection). Because of this, I was required to make sure that all
our pages worked 100% in Lynx (and in some cases even had to design
around an 80x24 character screen). Sometimes this was a huge pain in
the butt but it really instilled a discipline in the way I designed my
sites that I've tried to keep to this day.
I'd mentioned before that HTML is supposed to only describe the
structure of a document, not the style and I try to stick to that
philosophy as well. Fortunately, CSS gives you the ability to seperate
the structure from the apearance. And, as a bonus, tends to make the
Lynx support pretty easy.
An added bonus to designing this way is it tends to make your page
more accessible. For instance, it's much easier for a blind user with
a screen reader to navigate your site.
One of the problems with the web is that a lot of web designers have
come from traditional paper design backgrounds and are used to having
absolute control over the layout and appearance of their product. The
web was never designed to allow for this and you end up having to do a
lot of ugly hacks to try to make it work that way (which often don't
work across different browsers or platforms). The mistake is trying to
design for the web as if you were designing for traditional print
media instead of looking at how the web is a different media and what
design will or won't work for it.
But this isn't anything new, early television went through a similar
phase as people tried to figure out how it differed from radio (before
my time but I'm taking peoples' word for it). With any new medium you
go through an adjustment phase where you have to learn what will and
won't work with it.
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