Re: Best viewed with...

>Without these sites, with their little buttons saying
>"This site is best viewed/needs NN4/IE4" the rate at which
>people upgrade their browsers would slow down
>tremendously.

I found the following in the signature text of a related newsgroup post:

   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.
	    [Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996]


While I agree that such buttons encourage people to upgrade their browsers,
I still believe that interoperability should be first and foremost.  Pretty
soon, we will be seeing more than just multiple browsers on multiple
platforms;  we will be seeing user-agents other than personal computers.

We already have WebTV.  Soon we'll have flat panel newsreaders that allow
you to read the online news sites while relaxing in your recliner or
voice-interactive browsers that allow you to surf the web while driving in
the car.

Such implementations _rely_ on the interoperability of HTML and require
that the pages remain written in a standard structural markup.
Non-standard markup would mean that such innovative user-agents would be
unable to render many of the pages on the web.


Have a good weekend,

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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