- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charlesn@sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 11:14:53 +1000 (EST)
- To: Kristine Bradow <kbradow@ece.eng.wayne.edu>
- cc: "w3c-wai-ig@w3.org" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, David Sant <sdavid@ece.eng.wayne.edu>
I have not seen any accessible counters, although they can be coded. The difficulty is that all the mechanisms for including text generated on the fly (such as the number of times this page has been visited) mean that the page they are included in cannot be cached so they have to be fetched complete from the source each time, thus increasing the effective bandwidth requirement of the page and the load on the original server. Including counters (or other dynamic content) is more difficult than writing pages which simply provide static content updated from time to time. The easiest solutions around at the moment use databases to provide the content, and assemble pages on request. To use them accessibly requires a small amount of programming (you can read it out of the manual) and a knowledge of how to write accesible pages. It is a trivial exercise to create a counter using a system such as this, but it does require that you have control over the web-server. Most ISPs are not very keen on this. The alternative is to use, as kynn said, a PERL script or something similar, and Server-Side Includes to add the count as a piece of text. Most ISPs allow a cgi-bin, and the script required is fairly simple. But as a personal preference I would not put a counter on a page. If the pge owner wants to know how many people use it, then create a way for them to get the real stats. If someone reading the page wants to know how popular it is, then you can just use a picture of any number you like, and appropriate ALT text. No need for cgi's, PERL, or anything else. And it's almost as accurate as most other counters. Charles
Received on Thursday, 23 July 1998 21:36:50 UTC