INTRO:
Nancy, a very intelligent design-sketch, indeed!
J.D., yes, TABLEs should be deprecated from a "democracy"
perspective where DefinitionList would capture the sense just
fine.
But the pages survive Lynx 2.4.2 quite well, so we're >90%
covered. Follow the link for 2.4-FM from the "About Lynx" page
at Kansas for the leading-edge version of Lynx. It implements
tables in a passable fashion, but as Fote is quick to explain, is
not _real_ table support. That is _real_ tough in a
character-cell display environment.
DISCUSSION:
J.D., What information, like "HTML Version accepted" do the
legacy browsers already send to the server? It doesn't seem it
would be all that hard to add alternate styles of HTML-generation
to the server-side query-response-formatting to map the
information into an HTML dialect that fits within the browser
capabilities and maximizes exploitation of those capabilities.
Walt Mossberg, the WallStreetJournal columnist, even 'though
he is a cheerleader for Netscape pushing the capability
envelope, still has two versions of his WebPages to accomodate
those not blessed with TheRoyalBrowser. These are in parallel
trees that you select from the root page, so we don't need
to be dependent on un-implemented HTTP attributes, if they
aren't there.
Since specical handling to reach the technically-lagging <10% of
the world is going to be a low-budget matter, it might be best to
actually come up with _one_ profile which is
VerySimpleHTML_Indeed -- Works in the intersection of HTML 1.0
and HTML 2.0? Make that the base for the LowTech. I haven't
read the BareBones page, but I don't understand how TABLEs and
BareBones can be mentioned in the same breath.
Once people understand how this site works, FAQs themselves are
going to lose market share to launch-list-generator pages which
generate up-to-the-minute lists of RecentlyReAnsweredQuestions.
SUGGESTIONS:
1) Either stick to HTML 2.0 for the pages in this creation, or
support a down-tech version because the people who will take the
trouble to look up and read FAQs often don't have the latest
spiffiest SportsBrowser.
2) Nancy, consider a site-specific control path where a FAQ
maintainer can e.g. _block_ listing of a particular archive in
your metapage if the author is unhappy with the currency of the
copy served from that archive, for example. [Author and archive
details available from the faq-maintainers archive...] This does
not have to start out as a global [principle institutionalized by
a header recognized throughout UsenetNews,...]. It is an action
on the part of this site to assert that a FAQ maintainer should
be entitled to some control over how that document is handled
downstream.
This "control path" has many of the institutional problems of the
FAQ-posting mailbox that the News.Answers_ModerationTeam
supports. To block an archive-reference to a particular archive
for a particular FAQ, you probably want to authenticate the FAQ
maintainer is making the request, to some minimal level of
security (below the MasterCard level...).
Al Gilman Bigot_FOR: RTFM, Lynx,...
asgilman@access.digex.net
http://access.digex.net/~asgilman/
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