[thelist] the use of lynx

Mark Howells mark at mountain.ch
Wed Feb 27 04:49:01 CST 2002


>>> Does anyone still use lynx?  realistically?  or is that spending extra k to
>>> appease one half of one percent?

> How is it unsavory?  It's called business reality.  Before I emailed those
> stats out, my site had less than 1/2 of 1% using a non IE5+ or Mozilla4+
> browser.  One of the first questions we ask when we go into a scoping
> meeting with a client is related to target browsers.  We give the %.  We
> state the facts.  They say what do we lose by catering to that 1/2 of 1%?

It's laudable that you're assessing a target audience, but why are you
assessing your target audience to produce visitor stats for their target
audience? My site had almost 10% non-IE/NN visitors last year, which is a
bit different to the .5% that you're quoting -- it's all in the target
audience of the site / client in question. If my annual turnover was
$10-million, I'd be saying no to approximately $1-million in annual revenue
if I ignored "specialist" users.

> Me?  I'd say that k is wasted information on 99.5% of the viewing populace.
> It's better used on a stupid animated gif.

If that fits your audience's requirements then there's no problem --
provided that the audience won't change in a year's time and that the file
size and development time of the gif doesn¹t outweigh the miniscule amount
of effort required to put alt tags on navigational images. Then you'll have
to waste a k in the future, when you have to go back and recode the pages
that would have taken you an extra couple of minutes to make properly the
first time around.

> I came to a realization that the web post 1996 isn't about information as much
> as it's about media and brand messaging.

To the people who are making money out of the web, sure. But I thought the
economic success of online businesses was built on getting people to buy
stuff. I spend all day in front of a computer at work and if I can't read a
book or CD review online, then it's unlikely that I'll buy it -- I don't
have time to track down an offline review in Switzerland of a US-released
album. If I'm blind and want to read a book review online, then how can I
get that *information* from a site that doesn't work in my browser?

It's news to me that the internet isn't about information any more. I guess
I'll have to get my information somewhere else. :-)

> Image is everything (I can't claim it as original although I wish I could).
> If you can't view em, get a new browser.

And if there is only one browser available that you can use? We're talking
about text-only / non-visual browsers, or when your marketing is so
successful that the connection to your server times out before any essential
navigation images are loaded.

> Yea, it's a hard-line attitude, but hell, that's how Jacob does it, so why
> can't I?  ;)

Jakob Nielsen? Firstly, I'm sure that Jakob would use alt text, should he
decide to abandon his legendary approach of not using images for
navigational purposes.

Try loading <http://www.caterpillar.com> and <http.//www.useit.com> in Lynx,
then see which one is more accessible in a browser with no images.

Regards
Mark Howells
<http://www.mark.ac/evl/>




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