RE: Commercial Realities and Accessibility (was: Are Small Text buttons level 2 compliant)

> From:	Ben Morris [SMTP:bmorris@activematter.com]
> 
> 
> The other factor is that most large scale sites are template driven,
> especially those made by my company.  The beauty there is that you can
> make
> several versions of the site by changing just one template page.  So with
> 
	[DJW:]  A problem with server side templates are that
	they often do not keep up to date with minority browsers.
	A common complaint on the lynx mailing list (I believe
	quite a few blind user use Lynx and, at least at one time,
	it was used to provide public access to the web from 
	US libraries for those without their own machines) is 
	that they are not given access to features of the page
	that they could use because the site suppresses those
	features because it incorrectly believes the browser
	cannot cope (some also complain that they don't want
	to lose the feature even though they have to do some 
	source reading to work with the page).  (The typical 
	commercial approach, of course, is to output an upgrade
	your browser message, and give up.)

	[DJW:]  Another problem with them, for static pages, is
	that they are cache unfriendly.  This is a particular
	problem for poorer countries.  Many ISPs in such countries
	feel forced to configure caches to cache very aggressively
	because too few static pages are cacheable these days.  This
	causes security problems as they can cache dynamic content
	like web email, but they still prefer that to refetching
	what is really a static page, just because it was ASP 
	generated.  In fact, there is something of a war going on
	with sites trying to ensure that their banner advertising
	pages don't get cached and ISPs caching more and more 
	aggressively to ensure that they do.
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Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 14:38:52 UTC