Re: Palettes and bad rendering

Mike Meyer (
Fri, 3 May 1996 15:45:23 PST

Subject:  Re: Palettes and bad rendering
In-Reply-To: <>
From: (Mike Meyer)
Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 15:45:23 PST
Message-Id: <>

> I don't think we can sweep this under a rug by telling everyone
> to get true color or go away; 8-bit displays will always be less
> expensive than true-color because less RAM.  And monochrome will
> always be less than color, so those displays will always be around.

Right. This is part of the medium. This is why you have to design to
the medium, rather than trying to change the medium to make it look
like pre-industrial media.

> There's no reason we should allow a designer to optimize for all
> cases if he wants to.  It's even less acceptable to tell designers
> to "design to the medium" by ignoring those who want full color
> and sound if they've got it.

But what you're advocating *IS* designing to the medium. Designing a
document so that it displays "properly" on devices you consider
inadequate is part of designing for the WWW. As you point out, those
devices aren't going to go away; you either ignore them or design to
include them.

The medium already allows alternate representations of data. What's
missing is the ability to sort things out based on the user-agent
capabilities.  This doesn't necessarily have to go into HTML or style
sheets; HTTP could be extended to handle this as well.