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Re: Lynx-friendliness [was: Your 'puter need not die]
Posted By: codeman38, on host 205.188.193.172
Date: Tuesday, December 28, 1999, at 22:47:29
In Reply To: Re: Your 'puter need not die posted by Fobulis on Tuesday, December 28, 1999, at 21:53:59:

> You could just claim, with the checks, that you kept forgetting to switch over the dates when the new year changed... ever, for over 20 years. But considering I dated a paper with 1997 only recently, hey, it could happen.
> Fob"who, me, scattered? BTW, I'm back, and maybe my messages won't truncate from a Lynx browser"ulis

Now, aren't you glad that RinkWorks is as Lynx-friendly as it is? ;-)

Perhaps this could drift into another discussion: Sites that are a complete pain in the derrière to navigate in text-only browsers. Y'know-- frames with no sort of alternate route, ALT-tag-less graphics, and such? (Oh, wait, actually, I think those come a dime a dozen these days...)

Although I generally surf the web using a graphical browser such as Netscape or IE, being a web designer, I tend to critique sites that aren't viewable in some form in every browser. Thus, I always keep a copy of Lynx at hand to see what may not be accessible from a text-only perspective. And the results can often be shocking...

I've seen quite a few sites which looked roughly like this when viewed in Lynx, for example:

"[INLINE]
...the...
[INLINE]
...of...
[INLINE]
Use the navigation bar below to navigate our site.
[LINK][LINK][LINK]
[LINK][LINK][LINK]"

Not as user-friendly as the designers thought, eh?

Then, of course, there's those framed sites that show up resembling what's best described as "a blank screen" (though they've since upgraded Lynx to at least show a link to each frame). And then there's those sites whose only NoFrames tag is a (sometimes rude) message telling the user to get a frame-supporting browser-- kinda difficult on a non-graphical display...

I could go on and on ranting, being the nitpicker and critic that I often tend to be. But, well, I'll stop before I bore everyone to death.

-- codeman"blah, blah, blah"38