Re: [ARSCLIST] NYT: Online Library Wants It All, Every Book

[Premise Checker <checker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frank Forman here:

I agree, Don, that the pages from the revised Library of Alexandria be
accessible to text-only browsers, but I may be the last person on this
sorry ball of wax to be using one. I use Lynx, since I can mail webpages
to myself that are ready to forward, with stripping of irrelevant lines,
in a jiffy.

But a bigger problem is that text-only browsers have to specify a single
character set. I use ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1 = West European), the world's
most common one, but I'd have to switch to a different character set to
read Arabic. With a graphics browser, I can download foreign alphabet
software to my hard disk.

I can't run Java scripts, either, on Lynx, and this is a frequent
headache, esp. because most of them are so unnecessary. I can't access a
lot of .shtml pages, either.

I am fighting a losing battle. I've e-mailed a number of sites asking that
the pages be made accessible to Lynx, but no one has ever complied. There
are just too many geeks that want to show off their ability!

I do think that, at the very minimum, pages should be viewable by a number
of different browsers. I've visited pages that can be used in Internet
Explorer and not Netscape. The Federal Gummint requires that all its pages
be accessible by the blind, and this should mean Lynx, too, but this
requirement is completely ignored.

On 2003-03-02, Don Cox opined [message unchanged below]:

> On 01/03/03, Premise Checker wrote:
> > Online Library Wants It All, Every Book
> > New York Times, 3.3.1
> > By ROBERT F. WORTH
> >
> > The legendary library of Alexandria boasted that it had a
> > copy of virtually every known manuscript in the ancient
> > world. This bibliophile's fantasy in Egypt's largest port
> > city vanished, probably in a fire, more than a thousand
> > years ago. But the dream of collecting every one of the
> > world's books has been revived in a new arena: online.
>
> It will only be useful if they resist the temptation to build one of
> those hi-tech Flash based web sites that only works on Internet
> Explorer.
>
> A collection of good translations of Arabic literature on line would be
> a good thing, but it must be accessible to people using old or cast-off
> computers, or who are using a text-only browser.
>
> Regards
> --
> Don Cox
> doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>