Counters

Fri Oct 3 16:44:34 EDT 1997

>
>MANY web managers simply haven't got the time or inclination to do
>nit-picky perfectionist evaluations upon every browser known to
>humanity. (Does obsessive-compulsive have a hyphen?)  :-)
>

Stop, you're being silly.  (Though it does have a hyphen, according to both
OED2 and the American Heritage, two dictionaries on our site that don't
stipulate browser choices. :-)

Your remark about looking at every browser known to humanity is something of
a canard.  Platform independence is not a haphazard result of using as many
platforms as possible; it's built into the process of writing to standards
and understanding the medium.

As the Web moves to devices beyond desktop computers--and it does seem to be
headed toward telephones, pagers, palmtops, and speech sythesizers--platform
independence becomes more of an obligation to authors, but does not need to
be more of a chore.

Perhaps schools for the blind might be forgiven if their homepages start:

<body bgcolor="black" text="black" link="black" vlink="black" alink="black">
<p>This page is best heard with WebSpeak.</p>...

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