Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/02/18

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Lets try again My Photography Website
From: Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 08:46:10 -0800
References: <NDEIJCBGJPIEPDFEENCMAEJDCIAA.kitmc@acmefoto.com> <3E51D2F3.8030906@webshuttle.ch> <3E52608B.AF06EC25@pacbell.net>

A professional website designer, like a professional anything else, takes care to meet certain standards of efficiency, universality, accessibility, and so forth.

The norm in the industry right now is that any site that uses Flash is supposed to provide a non-Flash alternative (I dare you to find any Fortune 1000 website that uses only Flash).

Other norms are to be backwards compliant to browsers up to 3 or 4 years old (in this case, V4 browsers), to make all thumbnail images as small as possible so that thumbnails will load quickly.

The LUG is devoted to photography, not website design, but if it were devoted to website design, the conversation would go something like this:

A: here is my new website.
B: I can't view it with the tools that I use every day.
A: omigosh. I'll need to make it more universal.

When color television was invented, they made sure the programs could be seen on black-and-white sets. When stereo radio was invented, they made sure it would sound fine on mono radios. When cell phones were invented, they made sure that they could interoperate with existing telephones.

The list goes on.

There are a few major players in the technology industry that use incompatibility as a weapon, but it is possible not to be tricked by their ploys.

Universal access is one of the requirements of professional communication. The leading edge right now is making sure that websites can be used by blind people. That's more or less meaningless in the context of photography, but that's how far the pros are going right now.

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Replies: Reply from Jerry Lehrer <jerryleh@pacbell.net> (Re: [Leica] Lets try again My Photography Website)
In reply to: Message from "Kit McChesney | acmefoto" <kitmc@acmefoto.com> (RE: [Leica] Lets try again My Photography Website)
Message from Nathan Wajsman <wajsman@webshuttle.ch> (Re: [Leica] Lets try again My Photography Website)
Message from Jerry Lehrer <jerryleh@pacbell.net> (Re: [Leica] Lets try again My Photography Website)