WEB4LIB digest 813

[Sheryl Dwinell]

>>...and the de facto standards defined by the popular browsers. Ignoring the
>>imprtance of the last is ignoring economic and practical reality.

>Perhaps that doesn't matter if your are a comercial site that only wants to
>reach people who have high powered machines and the expertise to upgrade
>their browsers on a regular basis but in an academic situation our patrons
>often have hand me down machines.

thanks for making this point Gilles. Designing a web site for an academic
library that is seriously interested in serving the needs of their patrons
is philosophically different than designing a commercial site that wants to
'wow' people by taking advantage of the latest and greatest multimedia
doodad. That's not to say that you should only do 'plain vanilla' HTML on a
library web site, but you really should try to find out, as best you can,
the type of hardware/software your users have.  Making sites accessible to
the greatest number of people should be a higher priority than trying out
the latest HTML trick, in my jaded opinion.

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu