Browser independence

[Melinda Brown]

On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, Joe Schallan wrote:

> And, philosophically, is browser independence worth striving for?
> I know my site doesn't look so great with Chameleon Websurfer,
> but then how many people are using this browser?  Any comments
> on the appropriate place at which to aim on the Great Chain of 
> Features?

Well, I'm not sure how up to a "philosophical" debate I am, but in the net
world that I have to design for, I have faculty and staff whose access to
the Net ranges from the most current version of Netscape to Netscape 1.x
to those whose only access is through Lynx.  The computers they use range
from all powers of Mac and Pentiums to 286 PCs.

So I try to design platform independently (using the Bare-Bones Guide
quite faithfully).  If I wasn't able to do that, I'd try to provide an
alternative for the lower-end users.  I've also found tricks like
inserting info in a table with the <pre> tag will help it look nice in
lynx. (See http://scholar.lib.utk.edu/netserv/staff.html)

Fortunately, I've only had to contend with Netscape and lynx users in my
_primary_ audience of the UTK campus.  However, if I design for some
larger scale audience, I try to simplify everything.  After all, many
people out there are still connecting with 2400 baud modems on 286's at
home or have only Lynx access.  I guess my deciding factor is that I'm
more interested in providing the information to as many people in my
target audience as is possible than making the best looking page on the
Web. 

- Melinda
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melinda F. Brown				mfbrown at utk.edu
Electronic Services Librarian			(423) 974-3652 (voice)
Hodges Library, UT - Knoxville 	 		(423) 974-2708 (fax)
Knoxville, TN  37996-1000