I’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable – I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
Regardless, my browser (the latest Mozilla 1.3.1 build for antique Macs) is acting up. How to access the web? I have 2 options.
- Take over my desktop on campus via VNC. This works, but is dog slow.
- Log into one of our servers via SSH and fire up Lynx. Works like a charm. Browsing is refreshingly fast without images, javascript, and ads…
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how usable many websites are. Blogs seem to be faring even better – kudos to the various blog theme developers. It’s important to remember that 2 critical sets of users see the web through the eyes of a text-only browser.
- Visually impaired readers
- Search engines.
Yes. Google is essentially a visually impaired reader. I personally think everyone should periodically try their sites in a text-only browser to see how these two very important groups of users see things.
I’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable – I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
Regardless, my browser (the latest Mozilla 1.3.1 build for antique Macs) is acting up. How to access the web? I have 2 options.
- Take over my desktop on campus via VNC. This works, but is dog slow.
- Log into one of our servers via SSH and fire up Lynx. Works like a charm. Browsing is refreshingly fast without images, javascript, and ads…
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how usable many websites are. Blogs seem to be faring even better – kudos to the various blog theme developers. It’s important to remember that 2 critical sets of users see the web through the eyes of a text-only browser.
- Visually impaired readers
- Search engines.
Yes. Google is essentially a visually impaired reader. I personally think everyone should periodically try their sites in a text-only browser to see how these two very important groups of users see things.