Re: The Core Beliefs of Usability and Their CSS Application

On 7/4/05, Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl> wrote:
> Orion Adrian wrote:
> 
> >Content negotiation is a good means of what I'm talking about. It
> >allows for fallback mechanisms without the pain. It should also be
> >fairly trivial to create an image in a non-lossy format and create
> >packages for the major web server systems that would automatically
> >convert the image to something they end client could use caching the
> >results for a period of time.
> >
> How is that trivial? I might be able to do that on my simple PHP-based
> website, but I don't have the code for it, and I am not exactly looking
> forward to facilitating that. On non-dynamic web sites it's even less of
> an option. More so, would anyone be actually going to take the effort to
> do that? Doubt it.
> 
> The caching mechanism would also heavily impact my space allowance, and
> having the original as an uncompressed image even more so.
> 
> With regard to the 'fallback' technique in XHTML 2.0 where one can nest
> a number of image sources which are resolved based on the browser's
> support for the type - I am not particularly fond of that application
> (just one of the many though), but I think it is nice to offer such an
> alternative to content negotiation over HTTP. Moreover, it mainly comes
> with the current methods in XHTML 2.0 'for free', and is not a goal by
> itself for structuring things the way they are.

Ok, rather than uncompressed, use PNG. But content negotiation should
be something done by a server, not a user. A person's time is far more
valuable than the machine's. And I would be willing to bet the caching
mechanism wouldn't harm your space reserves that badly based on
graphic repetition we see in today's websites.

And I reject wholehardedly any argument that says the many should have
to do extra work because the few don't want to.

Orion Adrian

Received on Monday, 4 July 2005 16:00:54 UTC