Timwi wrote: JPEG and PNG are the standards now. Yeah. But I agree with you, so I don't mind :-)

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 04:52:08AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote: But we know that PNG is better, so yes, GIF is history. ;-) grin ps: but it's not a real question anyway. 'pedia logos were and are PNGs so if you don't see them now, you shouldn't run in the logo contest. :-)

Jimmy O'Regan wrote: That attitude is nothing more than techie talk. Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic requirements. I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category. They are quite rightly annoyed when they are constantly asked to upgrade or update their systems to accomodate a technical feature that they never wanted and will probably never use. Keeping track of RFC's may be fine for the techies, but it leaves the average user in a fog of confusion. For many users the simple idea of needing to upgrade is extremely stressful. Thomas Koll's attitude that anyone with hardware or software more than 4 years old must be mad strikes me as terribly elitist. IMHO backward compatibility should permit nearly full access to Wikipedia for any system up to 10 years old, perhaps even older. Of course some features will not work, and many will be restricted by only being able to use ISO 8859 coding instead of Unicode. Although it's not on line my older machine that functions on MSDOS 3.2 still works fine, and does everything that I want it to. Maybe I'm just one of those old farts that considers it wasteful to demote a perfectly good machine to the status of doorstop. Some years ago when I stopped using my first computer, an Apple II+ that had been upgraded to have 64K of RAM, I resented the wastefulness of such an action. It's still kicking around somewhere doing nothing, and I suppose that if I wanted I could fire it up again (if I remember how). The other important aspect about backward compatibility relates to schools and the education system. I think that most Wikipedians would be very happy to see a greater use of WP in the schools. The problem is that many schools are plagued with old equipment. In school districts with serious funding problems computers are not a first priority, and many kids complain that they have better equipment at home than at school. For those kids that don't have a home computer the problem is more serious. These are all things that should be considered when you say that people with equipment older than 4 years old are mad. Eclecticology

Ray Saintonge wrote: It does though. People with hardware and software that is 10 years old can perfectly well read the text, and perhaps even view some (if not most) of the images. Which leads us to what you said yourself: which is exactly the point. People get access to the really important stuff (the text) in a backwards-compatible fashion. HTML is backwards-compatible. CSS declarations and JavaScript are commented out for backwards compatibility. Even UTF-8 is backwards-compatible with ASCII, and tomorrow's Internet protocol (IPv6) will be backwards-compatible with the current protocol (IPv4). They just can't view the PNGs. Similarly, as mentioned before, users of an old version of OS/2 can't view JPEGs. If they are so desperate to view all the images, then they certainly would have upgraded; if they use 10-year-old hardware and software, then they probably don't make very high demands at technology and are more easily satisfied. Analogously, they won't be able to view the Hebrew (Russian, Chinese, whatever) Wikipedia if their 10-year-old technology can't interpret UTF-8; but then again, there's probably no way it can do Hebrew anyway, so it does not matter that they cannot read UTF-8. Of course we know old software and hardware are still in use, and they do have their right to exist and continue to exist, but technology is also advancing, and there's no reason to stay back in stone age. That would be a major obstacle, as shown above: Without UTF-8, or Unicode in general, a lot of languages aren't representable at all. (Maybe Hebrew has an 8-bit character set, but that's not the point.) If someone views an English article with a few Chinese characters in it, and they can't view the Chinese characters, they still have the rest of the article (which usually also contains Pinyin transliterations, etc.). It's not like we're requiring the newest/latest technology. It's just that users of 10-year-old technology will get only what their technology can offer. Greetings, Timwi