Re: professionalism and wysiwyg

At 09:56 a.m. 10/10/98 -0700, Brigitte Eaton wrote:
>these analogies, while amusing, don't say the facts. the fact is that the majority
>of people are not technology driven. if something works "good enough", then that is
>what they will use. unless there is an important feature that they feel they need,
>it's not worthwhile for them to upgrade. 

Also, even the above is primarily true only for "personal users".  A
large number of corporate users have their decisions made for them by
the company, and simply don't have the option to switch to another
browser even if they wanted to, and knew how.

(As a general rule, most "home users" will know more about how to
download and install new programs than "work users" who don't touch
a computer outside of work and only use email and the web because
their job requires it.)

So in a large corporate setting, it may be a long time before upgrades
happen.

In the big picture view, however, it's important to keep in mind that
we're not talking about "supporting OLD browsers" as much as the idea
that the web is founded on interoperability and platform independence;
write once, read from anything.  As such it behooves any "web
professional" (or serious non-professional) to support ALL valid
user agents, not just the ones they personally use today.

Standards are the biggest key to that.

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
Enroll now for my online stylesheets (CSS) class! http://www.hwg.org/classes/
The voice of the future?   http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html

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