I must admit, I hardly ever use text-based browsers other than the time that I spend figuring out what to use as arguments for grep in some CLI tool I'm making. I prefer lynx for that than view-source: in Firefox.

I'm guessing that they're wondering why should they really bother making their website backwards-compatible - I'm sure the number of blind people that use the net is rather small.

good to know there are still hard men that "surf" the internet text based.

Respect.

Hello, OP here again.

>>214 I suppose I don't surf the web that much text based for leisure (I mean, pr0nz are a lot harder to appreciate that way) but having grown up on waffle, xmail, gopher clients, etc. makes it still feel natural, and its cake to script Lynx to retrieve documents for you and check on things and... its always available from the command line over ssh when you're fixing a system remotely.

Wait. I said a key word. "Document". Holy crap. That's what http was originally designed to serve, documents. Not "pages" embedded with code so they change every time you look at them, and worse, bits of code scattered about so they don't describe a document at all any longer but rather a poor simulation of interactivity interfaces requiring a host of incompatible and mega-corp battled-over plugins and script languages all designed expressly to bundle your digital existence up as a marketable product sellable by someone other than you yourself.

And now I'm ranting...

From time to time you'll see web developers rant and rave about how important "standards" are for the future archival integrity of this generation's information and how this the is the first chance we have had as a species to preserve our data in this way in living replicating bits on an energized medium, etc.

And then they go off like the uncomprehending fags they are and make everything cease to be documents and the document payload they claim is so important impossible to reconstruct by forcing all former documents to be dynamic windows of digital scatter which display only a certain arbitrary state at a given instant instead of the actual "content" that underlies their great concern for humanity. And so defeat their own argument. This means the "web" as a digital archive is long dead, and instead database dumps and hopefully some impression of whatever application logic was required to weave that data into meaningful presentation as (now ephemeral) documents will be preserved for someone to reconstruct later to understand what we were thinking in this age.

Blah blah... a little off topic, but cuts to the heart of the whole "why text matters" argument and the difference between applications, pretending the web is a (shitty) platform for applications deployment and how separated all that is from actual linked-document provision that underlies the original design of the web.

>>211 Anyway, "not many blind people" isn't a good enough excuse for a government to commit to practices which render completely opaque its public data from a legitimate segment of its own public when the solution is completely, entirely and unforgivably preventable.

>>224
tl;dr
I don't like change or evolution.

>>266
Change isn't always for the best. Take the use of animated GIFs everywhere in the past - you'll hardly find anyone wanting them back (because animated fires and skulls are only cool for 3s, after that they distract from the text). Contrast that with useless JavaScript and Flash, which only purpose seems to be making the web more difficult to use - finding someone who objects to that, not surprisingly, isn't all that difficult.

That isn't to say JavaScript or Flash can't be used well. gmail makes good use of JavaScript (and it's the only website that I use where I really think JS is useful, but for everything else I have my trusty NoScript), and Flash is adequate for games. The problem is when people abuse the tech, and web devs can't get their dirty fingers on anything without abusing it apparently.