I've also encountred this dilemma between using standard HTML and
proprietary extensions when designing our museum pages. Ultimately I don't
think it's a question of either/or, but of both/and.

Netscape's flouting of standards to create its own Netscape "extensions" is
a bit worrisome as a habitual behaviour. If they are mereley pushing the
envelope of standards, then it will be great when their innovations *are*
part of the set of standards. Obviously this takes more then just Netscape
pushing them, or even the "de-facto" standard setting (sheer popularity)
that is an actual goal of the private market, while not so great for
institutions concerned about longevity, compatibility and maximum
accessibility of their data. So, pushing the standard is great, when it
becomes part of the standard, soothing all the concerns above.

Having said that, I have used Netscape extensions in our own WWW pages. One
thing I liked about many of the extensions is that they do not hurt the
page too much for other viewers. ie..If you had Netscape, you'd see the
fancy background; if not, your browser would ignore the extension, and
you'd see gray, no worse for the omission really. This gives you the best
of both worlds.

However some new features require you to build a very different page. This
seems a very familiar dilemma actually; the not-so-old one in which those
who develop WWW pages asked ourselves "how important is text only, or
gopher access? Should we continue to support them, or just move on?" The
best answer was to continue to support text-only browsers as best we could,
yet implement new features when we could, maintaining a balance between
access and innovation. I can just see when instead of "click here for text
only version of this page" we are typing "click here for a pre-inline video
version of this page" etc.

I think as long as we can provide our online information with the best
features, yet maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, we'll
be in the best shape. We certainly want to engage new visitors, but not
lose our old ones either!



Richard Rinehart              | University Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive
Systems Manager & Education   | University of California at Berkeley
Technology Specialist         | 2625 Durant, Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
[log in to unmask] | http://www.uampfa.berkeley.edu/