Oh the horror!

[hrj]

One forgets. So quickly one forgets the gnawing, ichor-dripping, Lovecraftian horror that is dial-up on the internet. Ah, but hope gleams brightly. After nearly 24 hours of no DSL, no sooner had I dredged up the phone-line splitter, the extra long cord, and the dial-up utility -- no sooner had I suffered through the downloading of a hundred e-mails at near-manuscript speed -- than Earthlink relented and released the DSL from its prison.

Comments

[julesjones]

There's a reason why my website is very unshiny, and that reason is that I still occasionally have to use dial-up when visiting non-connected family. I haven't forgotten what bloated sites look like (or don't look like) at dial-up speeds.

[zeborah]

I have decided that I don't mind shiny as long as it's failsafe: that is, it can have all the flash, javascript, movies, images and even music it likes, as long as

a) it doesn't download and/or start playing movies or music without my say-so;
b) if I don't want to see the flash I can go to an html interface;
c) if I've turned off images in my browser the site still looks usable and preferably even elegant.

It ought to still work with javascript turned off but I haven't found a need to turn it off so I don't personally mind.

But since I came close to exceeding my bandwidth last month (reached 80% in the first half of the month) I've been browsing primarily with images off; it's fascinating. It breaks LiveJournal threading, such as it is - the indents are lost. For no apparent reason it breaks a particular advanced feature in my library catalogue. (I can't be bothered reporting it; Library IT have more important intractable things on their plates. I did report, and they promised to fix, the way a particular important image is (not) working on the homepage. And I try not to email them with requests more than three times a week...) But most stuff works commendably well.

Somehow ads still manage to download.

[julesjones]

Yes, the real problem with the chrome is not the chrome itself, but that too many webdesigners who insist on using lots of chrome don't think to make the design degrade gracefully for those who have the chrome turned off. One of the last checks I do when I've been fiddling with my site is to look at the page through Lynx, to see if it makes sense with dial-up and/or accessibility browsers.

One of the consequences of this was that when I decided earlier this year to drag my site into the new millennium, it required relatively little work to change the look. (Though I still need to go through the site and apply the change everywhere.)