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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/25/05 21:18
On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Jim Higson wrote:
> This raises an interesting question: if most people enjoy the most
> sites I'd consider broken, maybe the market is functioning correctly
> by giving them what they want? The point of the site wasn't to be
> discussed highly on alt.html afterall.
It's hard to argue against that, isn't it? However, web sites aren't
sold to the end-user (i.e the readers), but to whoever is
commissioning them. If their sites can reach "most people" (by which
*they* presumably mean Windows users with some fairly recent IE
version? <grumble/>), it still may be interesting to consider how to
reach the ones who were left out. And maybe alt.html can help them to
do that, *without* the high-cost reworking and loss of function that
the push-and-click designers keep saying would be needed.
"They" have been telling us, for at least a decade, that the only way
to make flexible and accessible sites involves (1) full-scale
reworking that they can't afford and (2) take out all the geegaws.
How often I've heard them whining about "lowest common denominator"[1]
These assertions weren't true then, and they aren't true now - or
rather, they don't have to be true unless someone has set out to make
them so! Reworking is something that's needed if the job was done
wrong in the first place. And all kinds of nice *optional* extras can
be incorporated if it's done right. But you know all that:
> And I suppose there's nothing wrong with Flash etc in the right
> place... I could point to sites I've created that use Flash, but if
> the user doesn't have it they get almost the same experience (and no
> nagging message to install it!)
That's an example of what I mean, indeed.
cheers
[1]which itself is a misunderstanding of what the mathematical term
really means, but we know what they *intended* to mean.
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