Barnes and Noble snubs Lynx users

[Charles P. Hobbs]

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Robert J Tiess wrote:

> Original message:
> 
> >I know there are many on this list who think that web development 
> >should not be limited to the restrictions of Lynx--the text-based web 
> >browser.  I can even understand that point of view in the context of
> >knowing that your site is targeted at users with graphical browsers.

[...]
> 
> This is a problem with many sites now, and the problem is destined
> to worsen as graphical browser-specific HTML continues to
> dominate contemporary webmastery.  And as more browser-
> specific HTML tags get pushed through the Internet Engineering
> Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium,et al by the big
> browser forces (Microsoft and Netscape), Lynx users will find
> themselves increasingly abandoned, a sacrifice in the modern web
> rite to the quasi-deific forces of Java, Shockwave, and Plug-ins.
> It's a difficult realization, but the web everyone wants Lynx can
> never provide by virtue of its text-only capabilities.

If you have USENET access, you might want to take a look at the
newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html. It's an ongoing battle
between the so-called "HTML Purists", who are in favor of standard
HTML, and the "HTML Artistes", with whom accessibility takes a back 
seat to presentation (i.e. pages with graphics and no ALT= attributes,


And one of the most frustrating things about this issue is that it
is entirely possible to have pages that use graphics, Javascript, etc.
but are accessible to older versions of NN/IE (also often overlooked by
the "artistes") and Lynx. You just have to know the effect of each tag
on the browsers.

Many of the "tricks" I've seen on web pages will degrade gracefully
on Lynx. It's the older versions of graphical browsers that are most
worrisome. For example, older versions of Netscape do not support
color changes in table cell backgrounds. So, if you decide to use that
feature, I'd make sure that any text in that table cell was readable
against the main background of the page as well, just in case someone
comes in surfing with Netscape 2.0 (plenty of those still around)