[Wikipedia-l] PNG format???

[Jimmy O'Regan]

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