LYNX-DEV A plea for Lynx friendliness (fwd)

[Jason Baker]

Just thought I'd forward this to the list in general, get opinions
on it.  I'm thinking of ripping portions of it out and turning them
into a skeleton, so I can save time when firing these off to
hopefully change some minds. :)

Comments are very welcome...

Jason

----- Forwarded message from Jason Baker -----

Hi there!

I'm dropping a line to ask a little favor... would it be possible for
you (or whoever does your web page work) to keep the various people
who use the Lynx (text based) family of browsers in mind?  This group
includes freenets, visually impaired people, and powerusers who want
speed over graphics.

When I zipped over to www.discovery.ca, I was confronted with this:

----
                                             Discovery Channel Canada (p1 of 2)

   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] 
   Discovery Canada
        
   We're on the move!  The Discovery Channel Canada has launched its new
   web site, EXN.  All of your favourites, and much, much more, await
----

Not really too useful.  The [INLINE]'s evidently aren't that important,
as they aren't links, but it looks pretty bad. :(

And then when I went to www.exn.net, I got:

----
                                         EXN: The Exploration NetworkA(p1 of 6)A
   
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE]
   [INLINE] [INLINE]
   Amazement Park! EXN from the Discovery Channel Canada
   Science News
   On Discovery Now
----

Yoiks!  Even more images that I have no idea what are there for! :)

My tips on making images Lynx friendly:

 - If it's not important, use ALT="" - this makes Lynx ignore that
   there's an image there.
 - If it's moderately important, but the importance can be denoted
   by a text description, use ALT="Discovery Canada", or whatever.
 - If it's a really important image, turn it into a link to itself,
   so a Lynxer on a graphical terminal (such as myself - I have a
   nice big 19" color XTerminal) can download and view it by
   selecting it.  Something like this:
   <A HREF="foo.gif"><IMG SRC="foo.gif" BORDER=0 ALT="First ever real
   picture of a Foo in the wild!"></A>

Keep up the good work on the channels, and I'd love to come back in
a little while and see those nasty [INLINE]'s have vanished! :)

(BTW: There's lots of pointers to Lynx info at http://lynx.browser.org/)

Jason

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 address@hidden                    | To err is human; to really
 Systems Administrator, Information Systems    | bugger things up requires
 BC Family Maintenance Enforcement Program     | the root password.

 print unpack("u","92G5S\=\"!A;F]T:&5R(\'!E<FP\@:&%C:V5R\"address@hidden");
                 PGP key available from keyservers.

----- End of forwarded message from Jason Baker -----

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 address@hidden                    | To err is human; to really
 Systems Administrator, Information Systems    | bugger things up requires
 BC Family Maintenance Enforcement Program     | the root password.

 print unpack("u","92G5S\=\"!A;F]T:&5R(\'!E<FP\@:&%C:V5R\"address@hidden");
                 PGP key available from keyservers.
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