Anyone who wants to continue this, please take it off the list and go
private. Hopefully Hitoshi's server won't corrupt my Reply-To: (now you
know why mailing lists shouldn't overwrite user-supplied headers) but
I'm not holding my breath.

>>>>> "Collin" == Collin Ong <collin@mcd.intel.com> writes:

Collin> The problem with your theory is that people aren't being
Collin> entirely left out.  People with Mosaic will still be able to see
Collin> the text portions of the site, along with any gif graphics.
Collin> However, most of the graphics on the site are jpegs, so
Collin> non-Netscape users will have to use external jpg viewers to look
Collin> at those.  Less efficient, but certainly not exclusionary.

Not entirely true. If you put text into tables, they'll look be
seriously messed and very confusing on a browsers that can't do table
markup. There are a few other gotchas like that in HTML 3.0.

Collin> If you look at the Ryoko's shrine site, you would understand why
Collin> he saids that Mosaic users would see virtually nothing.  This is
Collin> because the site is setup sort of like an interactive click and
Collin> choose thingie.  Mosaic users will see the text choices, but
Collin> without the accompanying picture, it really doesn't make sense.

That's just poor design, plain and simple. Not everyone has a graphical
browser capable of displaying inlined images. And there are a lot of
people browsing on 9.6-14.4Kb modems who leave inlined imaging turned
off.

Collin> In any case, there really is no reason that anybody out there
Collin> can't be using Netscape.  Unless you have some personal reason
Collin> against Netscape Inc's policies or something, which some on this
Collin> list evidently do, there really aren't any barriers.

A common misconception. Netscape is a *comercial* program. If you're
outside of a very narrow slice of the world you have to *pay* for it.
NCSA Mosaic is 100% free.

Collin> There are barriers to using Mosaic, though, such as glacial
Collin> slowness,

NCSA Mosasic 2.0 for MS-Windows is faster than Netscape.

Collin> frequent crashes,

Where I work, NCSA Mosaic 2.0 for MS-Windows and MacWeb for Macintosh
(our primary platforms where I work ) are significantly more stable than
Netscape.

Collin> infrequent updates,

Netscape has been slower in their updates than *anyone* who's still
actively supporting their browser. And they don't offer any technical
support if you haven't given them money.

Collin> lack of support for many features used in many web sites, etc.

Of which none are standard HTML and shouldn't be supported. Netscape is
*finally* no longer advocating the use of non-standard HTML, but the
damage has already been done.

Collin> The Netscape browser is available free on the net, and can be
Collin> legally used for free by basically anyone.

You might want to read the license sometime. It's not free and it cannot
be used by basically anyone unless they pay for it. And, if you're
affiliated with one of those sites who has to buy Netscape, you have to
buy it for yourself if you want it for personal use, i.e., even if my
company has a site license I have to pay for it myself if I put it on my
own machines.

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