Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
Ralphem@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