Maybe you’re selling DVD players and I’m at the department store, looking to purchase. I know what the model I want looks like. I just want to use my phone to quickly determine if you can do it much cheaper. Why make it hard for me?

More than anything, these are issues that it’s simply useful to be aware of. It may be that you weigh up the situation and decide you’re ok with how your site degrades. As long as you do understand the situation and make a conscious decision, that’s a perfectly cool.

(noteable exception to those very few places that they can not get Broadband - and even then - they could by Direct TV or the like)

How many potential customers to a website are going to be one of the following

1) Can not afford broadband
2) Do not surf enough to care to about getting broadband

Really - how many of those are going to be someone that plops down a money online. The first group doesnt have any money, the second group would not be the type to shop online - otherwise, they would be online more often. I dont care if its a product from a store, or a subscription to content - that applies in both cases.

A lot of companies get that - and thats why so many of the bigger retailers sites are something that you would never try to browse on dial up. You have to either run basically two completely different websites - or scale back dramatically how you want to present your products. I am of the thinking that the small percentage stuck on dial up, versus the gained sales from really spruced up display of your products is a no brainer. You are going to make much more sales by displaying your products to the fullest, than you are going to by lowering the display to a be able to be seen by someone on dial up.

Not to mention - how many people are going to buy a product, with out looking at it? You will need images turned on to see it.

Unless that is that sitepoint only aims its content at bloggers these days - then I would be wrong.

did it ever occur to anyone that if the user has images turned of they dont really care about what the page looks like? It may matter to you, but why bother if they couldn’t give a monkeys? as long as they can read the content its good enough for them, so its good enough for me.

Your assumption is they don’t care. If that was the case, why would they leave CSS turned on? These people are motivated by reduced bandwidth demands, not a craving for Times New Roman.

http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/mir_image_replacement.html#comment8

The only problem with a (good)image replacement technique is that images have a fixed width, but the size of a text element is variable. I use a simple IR technique on my defunct blog which works for all ‘normal’ situations, but someone with a very large font setting might see an undesirable cut-off effect.

I did consider exactly that issue when I was experimenting with this stuff. In the end I decided that there is a point where scaling up a font can’t help you anymore, and that beyond that point it’s just users playing because they can.

However, if it was an issue for you, you could provide extra plain background on the logo graphic and set the width height in EMS. It makes very little difference to file size. For instance, changing our 160×50px SitePoint logo to 700×200px changes the file size from 1.70k to 1.75k. No real issue there.

You also ideally need to set a min-width/height to stop it scaling down too small and cropping the background image. IE doesn’t know mid-width though.

The only problem with a (good)image replacement technique is that images have a fixed width, but the size of a text element is variable. I use a simple IR technique on my defunct blog which works for all ‘normal’ situations, but someone with a very large font setting might see an undesirable cut-off effect.

The question is whether user agents ought to respect the width/height settings of the image even when the image itself is not available. There are cases when that’s what you want, but there are also cases where you’d like the alt text to be shrink-wrapped. I think we need another attribute for the IMG and OBJECT element types. :)

Etnu, from what I’ve heard, a lot of newer mobile devices don’t utilize WAP protocol, and even a new phone from Motorola is advertising that the internal browser uses Opera. WAP was a great idea, but not very well implemented. The phone making companies didn’t really adopt it, probably partly because it wasn’t highly adopted by designers themselves. It’s a catch-22.

Yep, WAP is pretty much an afterthought in feature lists for phones these days. They all trumpet their XHTML/CSS rendering abilities, although besides the Opera phone browser, none usefully support the ‘media=handheld’ media type.

Etnu, I completely agree that the best way to build a site targetted specifically at PDA/phones is to send different, optimized HTML to it. However I think there are considerations you can make in a site that you aren’t specifically targetting to low-bandwidth users that can improve their experience.

For instance, you might not generally expect most users to browse your glossy company website on their phone. However, a client may want to check the address on his phone on the way to visiting you. Making it easy to identify the site and navigate quickly to the ‘contact us’ page without needing to download 300k of glossy images would probably be a helpful option for him — without you needing to incur the time and expense of building a separate, parallel low-fi site.

As far as mobile devices go: WAP pages, people!

Etnu, from what I’ve heard, a lot of newer mobile devices don’t utilize WAP protocol, and even a new phone from Motorola is advertising that the internal browser uses Opera. WAP was a great idea, but not very well implemented. The phone making companies didn’t really adopt it, probably partly because it wasn’t highly adopted by designers themselves. It’s a catch-22.

If you’re looking for best accessible practices, I highly recommend browsing through Jeffery Zelman’s CSS.

Personally, I usually build for as many people as I can, but i’d rather build a site that degrades gracefully and is accessible, than one that’s not accessible at all!