Re: LYNX-DEV don't give a damn?

[Doug Lawson]

> 
> My web presence provider tells me that only 77.9% of accesses to pages at his 
> site (anything hosted at baremetal.com) are from Netscape 2.x, 3.x, or 
> MSIE 3. 
> 
> It all comes down to 2 things that have nothing to do with the public's image 
> of lynx:

I think it has a lot to do with the "public's" image of lynx.  If they 
think we are a force to be reckoned with they'll pay a lot more attention to
us.

> 1) Most page authors only ever test their pages using a single browser.  They 
>  .....
> 2) Most page authors like to use "nifty" stuff because it makes them feel 
> sophisticated. 

For large sites - corporate sites, government, libraries, large public 
institutions  - there are usually style guidelines - sometimes official, 
sometimes unofficial.  These are the sites that (now) set the tone for the 
entire WWW, just like NCSA and CERN did a few years ago.   

Most universities and colleges offer their authors a great deal of freedom
in designing their pages, so they don't have style guidelines, but on the
other hand, most of them teach HTML in one way or another, and the content
of what they teach becomes a sort of style guideline. 

So, these are the people we should be trying to affect.  With the 
exception of the universities and libraries, most of them are in the Web 
business to make a buck.  Or several million bucks, etc.  In a race between 
doing things the right way, and making a profit, the right way loses.

Now, the lynx community doesn't have the economic clout to force them to 
change their ways.  I think we can all agree to that as a given.

So,the question we should be asking is not "Why do these awful nasty HTML 
authors treat us so badly?" but "How can we use the leverage we have to 
change the way so many sites present HTML?"

As for the stray authors writing bad HTML on their own, they are 
followers of fashion, and when we can affect fashion, they'll follow us. 

As I said in a previous post, the blind community has an awful lot of 
moral authority.  An organization of blind internet users would have a 
lot of clout.  The other main community using lynx are sites that provide 
free or low-low-cost access to the internet for people who can't afford 
expenisve computers and/or slip-ppp accounts.  In either case, the 
interests of those two groups are awfully close, if not identical, to the 
interests of lynx developers (who have the added moral authority of doing 
this mainly for free). 

So we can legitimately lay claim to representing a lot of people here, 
and we should try to find a way to do so. 

Anyway, I'm repeating myself, so I'll stop now.......

Doug

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