as days pass by

This site does make (fairly heavy) use of JavaScript. It attempts to do it in a transparent and generally nice way, so as to not impede the progress of non-JavaScript aware browsers, or people who don’t like client-side scripting. You should also not be seriously inconvenienced when viewing this site without JavaScript, since the features that it adds are merely aids to navigation (or pointless chrome, depending on who you talk to :-) With regards to colour schemes, the images and colours should degrade sufficiently down to 256 colours without a problem at all. I’m not sure what they will look like in 16 colours; possibly horrible. If they do, I apologise. This site uses (as far as I know) no browser specific tags. It also checks its JavaScript; it should work fine in IE3 and Netscape 2 as well as higher versions by degrading its JavaScript calls through different versions, and, as mentioned above, JavaScript is not required for anything on the site. I did, at one point, consider having differing versions of this site; one for JavaScript aware browsers, and one not. However, that means mirroring information, unless you deprive the low-bandwidth people of some of the information that is available in the other site, and that defeats the object entirely. So, this site, as mentioned above, degrades well (I believe). If there’s one thing I really dislike, it’s seeing the phrase “This site best viewed with” or “is required to view this site” somewhere on a web page. Now, I’m the first to admit that there may be problems with this site about which I do not know; I’m not being deliberately hypocritical. (If you find that there’s a problem with displaying some aspect of this site, I’d appreciate it if you could email me and tell me about it; the address is on the personal page.) But optimising your site with IE or Netscape specific features, like (say) floating frames, or JavaScript 1.3, is a poor showing indeed. I have no objections to people who want to only make a feature available to (say) Netscape users, but please, please use JavaScript, or an Active Server Page, or a CGI script, to check your viewer’s browser and transparently offer it to them. Don’t tell me that I’m missing features, just because I haven’t got the latest version of the latest browser; just show me everything I need to see. And don’t, especially don’t, make navigation or use of your site depend on these ‘optional’ features!

Written by me. In 1997.

I still don’t think that use of your site should depend on JavaScript.

You probably don’t have to use ASP any more, though.