Re: lynx-dev http://www.netgrocer.com

[David Woolley]

> 
> Unfortuantely this site is frame and javascript dependant.  The frame
> dependency means that it looks as if it won't work for you (the page

I've not looked at this page, but one Lynx unfriendly construct which is
doing the rounds is for the menu pane to not have any links to the detail
panes, but merely to versions of itself drawn so as to highlight the option
you picked.  The real links are done by doing javascript like:

parent.detailframe.location.href="what should have been in href of A tag"

(anyone thinking of adopting this should note that relative links can
cause browser dependencies if the menu and initial detail are in different
directories - but no Lynx user should adopt it!)

Although I didn't look at British Telecom's Home Highway page in Lynx,
the nature of the criticism that it got on uk.telecom, particularly from
Lynx users, suggests it was done that way.  The description used was
"a maze of twisty little passages", which is what you get if you just
create a network of USEMAPped menu versions.

Annoyingly, the same day, the marketing department provided the help pages
for the web interface I was doing.  The web interface uses Java for the
main data entry, for policy reasons, but I'd been careful to make all
the bits that browsed the existing data, and were in HTML, Lynx safe.
The help pages used the misfeature above, and even had the relative
URL problem, so were unuseable on Lynx :-(.  The marketing people don't
consider they have a brief to support Lynx and only a reluctant one to
support IE3 and Netscape; they are probably right that the target market
won't use Lynx (it's for intranet use by third parties).

> You will need to try one of the other grocery shopping sites.  Does anyone
> on the list know of a lynx-compatible internet grocery shopping site?

You should also tell the original company that they have lost your
business, although, to be realistic, you should not expect them to take
any notice until they have saturated the market of fashion followers.
Their aim is to get the maximum profit out of the minimum investment.
Following fashions tends to attract the high spending youth market
and adding fallback mechanisms for other users has a development and
training cost (often people doing these pages are cutting and pasting
others' designs, rather than designing from first principles - the latter
requires training, which is itself a cost).