[WEB4LIB] Re: Centering Web Page

[John Creech]

On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Floyd Ingram wrote:

> Why not upgrade the browsers.

I just looked at last week's stats for our web server--we use Wusage to
analyse our log files, etc. We have numerous flavors of user agents
hitting our site--it's not as simple as just "upgrade."  Sure, we already
run Netscape 4x campus-wide, and lots of our remote users have a 4x
browser.  But many don't. 

We have 6 university centers scattered around central and western
Washington serving well over 1000 remote users, not even counting our
local users coming in from outside of the campus IP range.  And those
users do not have T1 lines to download 15M browser software--many of them
are connecting at 14.4 etc.  We can't ethically penalize them by demanding
they use a particular flavor of a particular browser.

Besides, we already get sufficient numbers of confused and frustrated
remote users calling with questions about connecting, configuring browsers
for our proxy server, etc. to keep me busy for a spell.

> You don't like it and I don't like it much either, but I am keeping up.

I don't believe we should expect users to "keep up." To me, that's
penalizing them because they have a 486, 8-16 megs of RAM, a 3x browser,
and a slow modem. My 2c, and now back to our regular programming. 

John Creech
Electronic Resources & Systems Librarian
Central Washington University Library 
400 E. 8th Ave. | Ellensburg, WA 98926 | 509-963-1081

"I aint no soldier but I been to war, I done some killing, all I kill
anymore is the pain and I'm just between trains."
                                    --Robbie Robertson--