Re: SEUL: Multiple Replies

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Chuck Huffman wrote:
> 
> How many Lynx visitors do you
> think this will impact? I honestly didn't think people still used text only
> browsers, because of graphic intensive web sites and graphical links that
> are so common these days. What does the browser do when a link can only be
> obtained through a graphic image?
> 
> I ran a few pages through that W3C validator... To put it bluntly, I wasn't
> impressed.

Then you probably don't want to run it through Bobby, which checks for
accessibility for disabled people.  

Most blind people I know use Lynx or something similar with a screen
reader program.  Additionally, most (all?) search sites use robots to
index websites; those robots only understand text.  That's why it's a
good idea to always include ALT and TITLE attributes with your IMG
tags.  If you run a page through Bobby <http://www.cast.org/bobby/>
you'll get even more picky, niggling pointers on making your HTML as
widely accessible as possible.

That brings up my next point.  The website hits show MSIE as the largest
portion by browser type, with Navigator on some MS OS second.  No
surprise there.  I'm forced to use Navigator on Win95 at work, so
anything I do during the day shows up like that.  However, those numbers
don't tell the entire story.  I think that hits by the various web
robots and spiders are more important than the individual user hits, as
they attract more people to us (I hope).  It'd also be nice to know if
there's any difference by browser type for people going deeper into the
site.  For example, do MSIE users generally hit only the main page and
one or two below that while Navigator on Linux users drill deeper?  I
don't know if that's the case, or if those data are readily available
from the logs, but it'd be interesting to know.

-- 
Doug Loss                 It is impossible to imagine Goethe
Data Network Coordinator  or Beethoven being good at billiards
Bloomsburg University     or golf.
dloss@bloomu.edu                H. L. Mencken