[Wikipedia-l] PNG format???

[Ray Saintonge]

Jimmy O'Regan wrote:

> Ralphem at aol.com wrote:
>
>> JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web
>
> From [[PNG]]:
>
>    Version 1.0 of the PNG specification was released on 1 July 
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1> 1996 
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996>, and later appeared as RFC 2083 
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFC_2083>. It became a W3C 
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium>     
> Recommendation on 1 October <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1> 
> 1996 <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996>.
>
> Having an RFC makes it an Internet standard, being recommended by the 
> W3C makes it a web standard. Simple solution: update your browser.

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