In a couple of different messages Eric Schubert made several
interesting observations.  He suggests that the server identify the
client and respond differently depending on the client.  In private
e-mail last week, I pointed out to Eric that identifying all possible
clients is difficult.
 
Eric then pointed out an astronomy link that created tables of objects
for either Netscape or Mosaic.  The question is what does this link do
if you are *not* using Netscape or Mosaic?  BTW, I believe that
Netscape 1.2 identifies itself as Modzilla and not as Netscape 1.2.
 
Eric goes on to quote the W3 suggestions for device independent
Web pages (I recommend reading this page if you are interested in
making your pages available to the widest possible number of client
browsers).  At Robelle, we test our pages with Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape,
and Mosaic.
 
Eric also stated that when he browses the Web from home he disables
automatic downloading of images.  From reading the log files of
the Robelle Web server I can say that most of the people accessing
our Web pages do use a graphical browser with automatic downloading
of images *enabled*.  In designing our Web pages, we assume that if
you have a graphical browser you will download the images (since our
pages are also designed to look nice in character-mode you still get
all the links even if you do use a graphical browser without image
downloading enabled).
 
As I said last week, designing Web pages for all possible client
browsers and network connections (i.e., slow and fast) is an
interesting challenge.
 
Cheers,
 
David    <[log in to unmask]>