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.