Re: Lynx Viewer

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Wed, 5 Aug 98 16:26:30 -0500, habanero@delphi.com wrote:

>Wow, talk about nerdspeak!!  I've learned sailing from a book and the pictures
>were just as important as the text, in fact more so, as a description of
>techniques would have thouroughly confused me had I not seen the pictures of
>what they were trying to describe.
> 
>To each his own, I guess, I still prefer books with pictures. ;o)

I guess you missed the part where I said that pictures and other
elements of web pages were SUPPORT for the text.  You can't learn to
sail from a web page with a bunch of pictures but you can learn to
sail from a web page with a bunch of text.  If that text page also had
pictures to help make a point, then that page would make it even
easier to learn to sail.

You need to balance it all out.  Lynx users can still use a web page
that is well designed and download any of those support images and
view them if they feel that that web page has good information to
offer.  However, if all they get is a bunch of image tags with few or
no alt tags to describe them, then they have no idea that the page
might actually contain good information.  They're more likely to just
skip the page and move on.

I do this a lot with Internet Explorer.  Most of the time I have
pictures turned off and if all I get is a bunch of empty picture
frames and no text to tell me what the page is about, off I go to
another page.  I'm not going to waste my time downloading all those
images.  Especially since I only have a 14.4 kbps modem.  And believe
me, I'm not in the minority with using older, slower machines with
slower net connections.

I think web page designers should do more work to make their pages
more usable by their entire audience rather than tell the audience to
go out and spend lots of money so that they can get the proper
hardware and software to view their page.

I'd like to add a smiley in this message somewhere to show that I'm
not dead set on this way of thinking or that I think everyone else
should be like me but I can't find an appropriate place to put one. :)

This is just my opinion and everyone else is entitled to theirs.

=== To ensure I see a reply please also e-mail me but remember to:
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    Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University on Delphi