What is it with people named Siegel?

[Thomas Dowling]

As a book recommendation, a rash of people said something like:

> I also wanted to recommend Siegel's book...

I don't want to criticize anyone's recommendations, especially for a book I
haven't read, but you  may want to be aware that Siegel is regularly
lambasted on some of the www authoring newsgroups; his suggestions for
making your site awesome or cool often fail to "degrade gracefully" on
older browsers, or browsers with--for example--images turned off, and they
may not fare well at the hands of some crawlers/indexers.  By way of
example, turn off images in your browser and go to
<URL:http://www.killersites.com/>; in Lynx, you'll see something like:

  REFRESH(15 sec): http://www.killersites.com/core.html

                                  [INLINE]
                              [LINK] [INLINE]

                                  [INLINE]

And bear in mind that a non-negligible percentage of users (probably
between a sixth and a third) regularly surf with images turned off.  And
some of the rest of us keep an itchy trigger finger over the Stop button.

As I said, not a criticism of this book recommendation.  But anyone getting
the book should be aware that it's talking about design aimed at a
subsection of the Web's users, and many people may fall out of that
section. 

Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu
Ohio Library and Information Network