Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
(stuff)
That attitude is nothing more than techie talk.
Yeah. But the guy (and I'm basing the presumption on his name, just in case anyone points out the thread on gender neutrality) said JPG and GIF were the web standards, I said, in an admittedly techie way, that PNG was also.
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.
Well, for people who want text only, lynx works perfectly, I've just checked. If people want all the bells and whistles, there's a certain level of features their browser should support - it's not like we have flash, VRML and real video streams all over the shop. This person wanted us to switch from PNG to GIF and JPG because he, a minority of one so far, couldn't view them. What next? A friend of mine still uses the browser that OS/2 came with in 1995, which doesn't support JPG. Should we get rid of the JPGs for him? And yes, I realise upgrading scares a lot of people, but there's a tech recession, they should be able to get a good price from a tech :-P