[thelist] AOL ate my website

[Rebecca Milot-Bradford]

>Mark Garrett wrote:

>I keep an AOL account just for the purpose of testing web pages.

+1 on that. To keep costs down, you can use their "bring your own access"
plan for $9.95 per month or the light usage plan (3 hours) for $4.95 per
month. Despite the aggravation of AOL, I find it to be a good investment.

Best Wishes,

Rebecca Milot-Bradford

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Garrett [mailto:letters at since1968.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 7:28 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] AOL ate my website


Hi Phil,

AOL has about 30 million subscribers. If your target audience is
general-interest American, you should test your pages in the AOL browser. To
the extent that your audience is tech-oriented or mostly international I
wouldn't worry much about AOL.

AOL uses a proprietary version of Internet Explorer. Three most common
problems I've run into with AOL:

1) They compress images. Nothing much to be done about it if your web site
is graphics intensive, but you can always tell AOLers how to turn off image
compression;
2) They cache pages and their caching does not always respond to common
strategies;
3) Sending mailing list emails to AOL addresses can be tricky.

I keep an AOL account just for the purpose of testing web pages. It used to
be the case that with older versions of AOL you could load the software,
join AOL as a trial, cancel your membership, then (as long as you had your
own access to the web) open the AOL browser and check how it renders. I
think they've closed that loophole but you might want to try it. I can't
believe how many people think you should test for Opera but not for AOL.

Regards,

Marc Garrett
since1968.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "phil" <phil at xlab.co.uk>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 5:45 AM
Subject: [thelist] AOL ate my website


> Is the AOL browser based on another browser engine (e.g. Netscape, IE)
which
> I could test with instead?
>



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