Re: apartheid and Frames

[davidh@electric.net (David Hathaway)]

In article <199607292036.NAA24288@gryphon.com>, nessus@mit.edu (Douglas Alan) wrote:

>Should we let the blind stand in front of the bulldozers of the
>Internet revolution?  Perhaps this would yield a better world, but (1)
>I tend to doubt that it would.  Design is an art form; it is a form of
>human expression, and it shouldn't be squashed out of concern for a
>small, handicapped minority of the population.  (2) It's just not
>going to happen.

Out of this entire thread, *this* message makes the most sense. Imagine for a 
second if Kate had decided not to use a Fairlight due to it's extremely 
limited compatibility. Now, before anyone goes rabid about this analogy, I 
fully realize that everyone, with hearing could hear either a piano or 
fairlight, thus, making it a poor comparision in some ways, but my point is 
thus : Art moves forward. As you mention, a few years ago, and I was on the 
net for this moment, we had Lynx and Mosaic. A constant argument was ongoing 
within usenet as to how people should write Lynx compliant pages, and, really, 
that argument has never left, it's just that now we are Lynx/Netscape/MSIE 
focussed. Again, back to my point, things such as the web move forward. When 
Netscape supplanted Mosaic as the browser of choice, a renewed amount of 
carping arose due to Netscape's "extensions" to HTML 2 , which some of 
eventually got adopted into the HTML 3 spec . Personally, I usually try to 
write my site in such a way that *any* browser, Lynx or otherwise, can look at 
it, but, I do it because I'm reasonably HTML conversant and take it as a 
design challenge. Mind you, I haven't checked in a while, so if someone wishes 
to point Mosaic at http://www.monkey-boy.com/cmusic/ , maybe they'll find I 
have been asleep about this...On another tangent, if a person only owns a 
turntable, they would certainly be left out of the current crop of recordings 
that rarely ever see vinyl any more.

Ok, enough rambling, again back to my basic point. While I agree that people 
should probably try and take the effort to make their pages universally 
readable by any browser, the "art" (I hesitate because of some of the pages I 
have seen...) must move forward, thus, people *should* experiment with frames, 
javascript, pure java, or whatever else catches their fancy, or we all might 
as well go back to Lynx en masse. This would cause Netscape to crumble as a 
company, thus creating many unemployed people and wreak havoc with the 
economy world wide.

8)



>
>Just for yucks, I went to Burkhard's Web page using Mosaic and saw the
>front door note saying that I couldn't access it with Mosaic.  I
>didn't let this deter me.  I asked Mosaic to show me the HTML source
>code, and after looking at the source code for a moment, I went to the
>URL's indicated in the HTML source.  I did this knowing nothing about
>HTML.  I was able to get to all of the material on the Web site using
>this technique, although some of the pages had ugly JavaScript code in
>them that Mosaic doesn't know how to present in a pretty manner.
>
>You want to make a difference, Chris?  Teach the blind to use this
>technique.  Better yet, since the source code is available to lynx and
>Mosaic, why don't you modify them into a tool for the blind?  A tool
>that will automate my manual technique.  Even better yet, set up a Web
>site for the blind that will allow other Web sites to be specified and
>will provide a blind-friendly interface to them.  Or just go to the
>library and read some books onto tape, for crying out loud.
>
>There are many constructive things you can do, Chris.  Accusing some
>poor schmuck of being a Nazi because his Web site doesn't meet your
>standard of compatibility is not constructive.  Nor is trivializing
>the systematic oppression of a race of people.
>
>|>oug


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