Re: Informing visitors?

At 12:19 PM -0500 12/16/97, Figment wrote:
>At 05:20 PM 12/16/97 +0100, killian jenkins wrote:
>>I think it is just good netiquette though to let people entering your site
>>know what viewing resoluion it was composed for.

Many users don't even know what a "browser" is (even though they use one
all the time). You certainly can't expect them to know at what resolution
their system is set or even how to change it.

Even though I know how to change mine, I won't.  A single site is simply
not reason enough for me to change a setting which I have chosen for very
good reasons.  Sites should (and can) look good at all resolutions.

Having said that I'll go on to the question which you are addressing.


> I would, of course, design in such a way as to not exclude anyone.  But what
>is the best way to inform people that, "This site will look great in any
>browser, but if you look at it in IE 4, you'll see some REALLY cool stuff!"

I think you have to take this one out of the users' hands and deal with the
issue on the server-end.  In other words, I expect that you will have to
implement server-side browser detection in order to direct the user to one
of a number of appropriate files, containing DHTML or strict HTML.  There
are numerous ways to do this, depending on the server and platform you are
running.

In my brief research into IE4's version of DHTML, I have found that it
relies on Javascript to write the document.  I have not attempted to look
at these sites using older, javascript-enabled browsers, but I suspect that
they would not be able to understand the Javascript that then generates the
DHTML.  Thus you would have to maintain two radically different versions.

Bleeding-edge technology is not for the faint of heart.  That's why I'll
stick to HTML until I have a whole *team* of geeks to work with.


--Steve



___________________________________________________

Stephen F. Mai
University of Minnesota Department of Rhetoric
MS Program in Scientific and Technical Communication
maix0020(at)maroon.tc.umn.edu

Visit "World Wide Steve" at:
http://www.agricola.umn.edu/people/smai
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