Re: [amsat-bb] AMSAT Website Redesign Available to the BB

[Robert Snyder <rsnyder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jens Schmidt wrote:

>Whatever Amsat-NA just achieved with the launch of ECHO,
>is well and truly undone with the re-design of the web site.
>
Wow. That's a pretty aggressive statement.  The success of planning, 
funding, building, and launching of a satellite is undone because you 
have a problem with a web site.

>First point is that my browser is mis-detected as Mozilla, it's not,
>it is Netscape.
>
>  
>
 From the release notes of Netscape 1.0:

And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."

Mozilla was the original name of Netscape Navigator before it was 
released, and when they decided to Open Source the bulk of the code, 
they called it the Mozilla project. Today, code development is done 
primarily using the Mozilla browser, which every so often gets combine 
with a few non-Open-Source AOL features and is release as Netscape. 
Netscape 7.1 is based almost completely on Mozilla 1.4. When Netscape 
reports it's User Agent (the name of the browser) to the web server, it 
sends "UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; 
rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)" (depending on OS and 
localization settings)

>Second point is that your suggestion that I should update my browser
>per your list is way off track.
>I have for a number of years been able to access and read 99.99% of
>the web pages on WWW, including Amsat's NA page, that changed
>now to 99.98%.
>  
>
If you're having trouble, I'd have to guess you're running 4.x or 
earlier, in which case, you may be able to reach 99.98% of the sites you 
care about, but there are a lot of sites out there that won't work for 
you. Many many web site designers only care about IE, because that gets 
them in excess of 95% of the eyes. AMSAT has done a lot more than that, 
it works well in (less than 5 years old versions of) Mozilla/Netscape, 
IE, and Opera from my testing.

I do feel however that there needs to be a version that works well with 
the lowest common denominator, text, especially given the number of 
visually impared people involved in ham radio. I also think that 
browsers should be able to bypass the warning page and attempt to browse 
the home page, since trying to keep ahead of User-Agent strings is a 
losing battle. I suspect that getting rid of/avoiding the warning page 
would solve a lot of problems. The index page looks fine in lynx 
2.8.4rel.1. I suspect that older graphical browsers would be ok too; 
style sheets and the like are designed to fail gracefully.

>Some of us have very good reasons to not use only operating systems,
>browsers and other software that has received the blessing of Microsoft.
>As a result we do not have the options to "upgrade", or even a wish
>to do so.
>
>  
>
The list of browsers on the site is pretty un-Microsoftish....  Safari 
is Apple's bundled Mac OS X browser, Mozilla runs on Windows, Mac, UNIX, 
and various embedded platforms, Opera runs on Windows, Mac, some UNIX 
and cellphones (which amsat.org does work on), Konqueror is KDE's (Unix) 
default browser, and Netscape, Firefox, and Camino are all based on Mozilla.

At some point a line in the sand needs to be drawn to provide useful 
features, else we'd end up using gopher or putting text files up for 
FTP. I think expecting people to have a web client that was released in 
the past 4-5 years is appropriate.

>Your priority of (the store, area 51), seems to me mis-directed, since it
>is not going to be visible till such time that Amsat-NA reverts to the 
>
(visible to you)

>WWW
>standard (99.99%), which appears to be HTML 3.0 / 4.0, and not "clever"
>style sheets, some form of java or cgi scripts.
>
>  
>
Cascading Style Sheets are part of WWW standards. As is JavaScript and 
CGI (not that CGI would affect you). While the page doesn't evaluate 
clean under HTML 4.01, the three errors that are generated from running 
it through http://validator.w3.org aren't significant.

Bob N2KGO
----
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