A long time ago, the Web started out as a way to publish information. Over the years, Web pages have become increasingly graphical, loaded first with backgrounds, animations, and transparent GIF images, then with Flash, pop-up windows, background music, eventually with Java junk, Web sites "optimized" for particular browsers, Web sites that only work with particular browsers, etc., and the trend continues. Some sites even render parts of their text content as graphics so that they can "guarantee" a particular look. We are led to believe that sites without a lot of graphics are mundane, or do not look "professional", or even that they are not "user friendly".
Of course, it all looks very snazzy, and it even loads in a reasonable amount of time if you have a broadband Internet connection to a really good ISP and a multigigahertz PC with which you are surfing the 'net.
To the Web page designers who have left us this legacy, may you wind up somewhere where the only Internet access is a Pentium 100 running Windows 95 and a 14.4Kbps modem on a noisy phone line.
So what does this mean?
A functional Web site delivers useful content to viewers, not just "viewers who are running the latest version of Internet Explorer." While many viewers do use IE, a significant fraction use alternate browsers. HTML documents are supposed to be a standard, and should accordingly render similarly on different browsers. A functional Web site rapidly delivers content to viewers, not just "viewers who happen to be on the end of a T1." A Web page that cannot load and be usable to a viewer in a short time frame is not very functional. If it takes a viewer several minutes to discover that they have pulled up the wrong page, it is possible the viewer will move on to another Web site without such intense requirements. A functional Web site needs to minimize the bells and whistles, while complying with open standards, or it isn't really a Web site... it's just a remote filesystem for Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This Web site attempts to present useful content in a manner that allows efficient navigation, while offering compatibility with a wide range of Web browsers, and without excessive quantities of gratuitous graphics. At the time of this writing, there are no background graphics, no animations, no mandatory Flash pages, no pop-up windows, no background music, no Java, and no attempts to optimize it for any particular Web browser. This site makes modest use of small graphic images, tables, fonts, and color in an attempt to present a coherent user interface to the viewer.
Does this Web site suck? Perhaps it does, but on the flip side, this page takes less than ten seconds to load at 14.4Kbps.
http://www.spies.com/~ceej/Words/rant.web.html Why the Web sucks, II