Now that the HP3000 can inter-communicate and inter-interoperate with lots
of different clients (and with lots of different servers), it's time to
reflect on the inter-esting issue of information inter-change on the
Inter-net.



"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label
on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network."

                        -Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
                         (The chap who invented the World Wide Web)



To see a *radical* treatment of this hot topic, go to the BERKELEY.EDU
(where else would you go for radical treatments?) domain:

http://server.berkeley.edu/~cdaveb/anybrowser.html


Here is an excerpt:

________________________________________________________________

Graceful Degradation

    Since HTML is continually changing and different browsers support
different elements, graceful degradation is the key to making sure that
pages are readable and accessible in all browsers. When a browser
encounters tags it doesn't understand or can't display, degradation takes
place. Whether this degradation will cause some of your page content to be
lost to the browser, or whether the content of your page can still be
accessed fully is dependent on whether the degradation is graceful.

    The HTML standards were written with graceful degradation in mind--new
attributes to older tags are safely ignored so that the rest of the tag can
still function normally, and new tags are written with alternative display
for browsers that don't support them in mind. There are many elements of
HTML that can't be displayed or can be turned off in browsers that were
written with the knowledge of these elements--such as images, java, and
frames. Using the appropriate methods to provide an alternative message to
those who can't see those elements or have turned them off is one way to
design for graceful degradation.

    If you design pages with graceful degradation in mind, by utilizing the
built in elements of the HTML standards, and the advice provided here, you
can design pages that should degrade gracefully in all browsers and are
accessible.
________________________________________________________________



The previous comments on "Graceful Degradation" (from the bowels of this
web site) are of particular interest to people involved in the design and
maintenance of ANY online-transaction-oriented computer system  -- such as
an IMAGE-based application.  I have already made lots of notes...









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|            r  |  Alfredo              mailto:[log in to unmask]
|          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
|        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego               Tel 208 726-9100
|      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs           Fax 208 726-2822
|    d          |  Adager Corporation
|  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
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