> > only browsers, so most commercial sites can only commercially justify
> > supporting them.
>
> Cite? I've been hearing this in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
> since 1995 as a reason for creating limited access sites and excluding
The 80/20 rule is the position that my employers' marketing people
take to any suggestion that they should make their external web pages
and intranet products tolerate anything except the big 2. They would
rather only target IE4+ these, days, but, unfortunately for them,
Netscape has more than 20% of the market.
I tried to write my bits of the intranet products** to tolerate Lynx, but
even then there is a limit to how far one can push ones neck out; the
job of a commercial programmer is to fulfill the requirement specification
to time and budget, not to hold the moral high ground. The other developers
had no qualms about making Javascript only pages, and one of them wrote
the top level page (which is where the marketing people want you to
be particularly flashy) so you can't actually get to the Lynx safe pages!
It only takes one programmer to consider their career to break
Lynx compatibility.++
Companies don't generally publicise the weaknesses in their products, so
I'd be surprised if you got many companies to actually go public on a
statement that they couldn't care less about the minority Lynx market,
although their support people may be more forthcoming to individuals than
their official spokesmen are to the world. I doubt that you will find
many citable references; that would be washing dirty linen in public.
++ The person I am thinking of at least knows what he is doing; many
commerical web page authors simply cut and paste things that "work" with
their favourite GUI browser.
** These are products for other businesses, which tends to make text
only users very unlikely.
