Dehanced for Lynx: The list

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0. Completely useless, don't waste your time.

1. You can actually get past the home page, but you have to ask yourself: Why?

2. Like assembling a jigsaw puzzle: Eventually you might get something out of it, but they don't make it easy on you.

3. Almost good enough to get off this list.

adobe.mag

This is an online magazine about Adobe Acrobat, a way to publish things online for people not satisified with HTML. Connect and you read "This is an image based site. Please turn on your images and reload this page. Thank you." Ah, but then you see the link for "text only mirror site." So you click on that, only to get abstracts of articles you STILL can't read because they are in Adobe's proprietary Portable Document Format, not text. Bah!

Dehance-o-meter: 1.

Let me see for myself

boston.com

The Boston Globe says it spent several million dollars building this Web site, which offers frequently updated New England news. For the most part, it's OK - it even has decent tool bars for those of us who can't see the image maps. Now if only the could figure out how to use "ALT" statements so Lynx users wouldn't see [LINK] all over the place.

Dehance-o-meter: 3

Let me see for myself

Boston Athletic Association

Run away from this Boston Marathon site, all bollixed up with [ISMAP]s and unusable tables.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Blue Cares

Maybe the name of this Blue Cross/Blue Shield should be changed to Who Cares. It's actually a shame - about five minutes' worth of work would change this into a perfectly decent site.

Dehance-o-meter: 2

Let me see for myself

Cajun.net

Who are they? All we know is they sell computers.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Campbell's Soup

Mmm, mmm, bad. Liberally seasoned with unusable [ISMAP]s and [INLINE]s. But at least they provide a copyright notice.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Computer Shopper

On paper, Computer Shopper is big and bulky. Online, it's completely useless. But thank goodness the copyright notice is there!

Dehance-o-Meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Cray C90 Family Product specs

Oh, what in the world does the Cray C90 Family do? We'll never know, unless they fix this page (like they have with the rest of their site).

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Crisp

Used to be a 0, but they now have a text-only page. Now if only they could do a better job with the ALT statements.

Dehance-o-meter: 3

Let me see for myself

Digital City Washington

Your basic useless [ISMAP].

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Discovery Channel Online

The first time we looked, this site rated a 0 - it was totally useless to Lynx users. They've improved things considerably - you can now get something useful out of this site. But they still need practice eliminating [LINK]s.

Dehance-o-meter: 2

Let me see for myself

Double H and Pjon Pjons Home Page

Wouldn't be too terribly bad if it weren't for the link to the "primitive version of the pages," i.e., the text-only one.

Dehance-o-meter: 2

Let me see for myself

Exclusiv Magazine and Catalog

Like the Discovery Channel, they've made some efforts to raise their 0 rating. And like the Discovery Channel, they still have some work to do.

Dehance-o-meter: 2

Let me see for myself

4AD

Connect and you see "Content," so you click on that. Then you get something that looks like a table of contents. But everything you click on brings you to a page with a [LINK] or three. Life's just too short to waste on such nonsense.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

George

With all that money, you'd think John-John could afford some extra text to tell us Lynx users why we should care.

Dehance-o-meter: 2

Let me see for myself

Good Housekeeping

Bad Webmastering. Connect to this site and you see what looks like a bunch of links. But it turns out many are image maps, which means that you can not get to all of the content. Too bad; we really wanted to see the Apple Lover's Bake Book.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Gordon & Glickson, P.C.

Connect and you get a single mysterious [LINK]. Click on it, and you get to some actual content, but why bother?

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Guestbook 2.0

Quelle deception! The first page looks perfectly usable, but hit your spacebar and you are assaulted with line after line of "This is an imagemap, you can't use it without a graphical browser." All the more annoying because the author won some sort of award for this page.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Healthcare Interchange

Probably has something to do with health care, but you'll never know, because the home page is an image map. Oh, there are links to home pages of the people who maintain the site. If you click on the first one, you can bring up a form submit something to their "suggestion box." We suggested they add a text tool bar for Lynx users.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Internet World

Would be an ideal site if only they'd remember to insert the proper ALT statements so Lynx users aren't treated to endless lines of [IMAGE] tags.

Dehance-o-meter: 3

Let me see for myself

Iomega

Look! Is that a Zip Drive on your desk? We wouldn't know, thanks to Iomega's annoying LINKed site.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

MSNBC

Hey, Bill Gates! Hey, Tom Brokaw! Here's some news for you: With just a few simple ALT statements you could make your site make sense to us. Now if only you could use those to get rid of the odd gibberish that apparently only means something to Internet Explorer users.

Dehance-o-Meter: 2

Let me see for myself

Newspaper Association of America Hotlinks

Geez, you'd think if anybody appreciated the value of simple, text, it would be newspapers. But we have no idea what the NAA thinks is hot because the page requires the use of Netscape 2.0 or higher - connect with anything else and you get an obnoxious note about needing to change browsers. And no e-mail link for sending in a complaint.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Nixus

"Get Netscape 2 or higher or MS Internet Explorer 3 (in worst case), and connect again." Sorry, Nix, wrong answer.

Dehance-o-Meter: 0

Let me see for myself

NRMA

This is apparently the Australian equivalent of the American Automobile Assocation. But we'll have to take our correspondent's word for us - there's no way to get past the, um, welcome page.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Rothman's Cape to Rio Yacht Race

Netscapism spreads to the southern hemisphere via this South African site. Not only can't you get past the "welcome" page with Lynx, you can't enter with older versions of Netscape!

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Rockshox

What is this site about? We have no idea. As they say on the home page, right before the two, count 'em, two "Download Netscape now!" messages, "Be warned that all navigation on this site is done via image maps."

Dehance-o-meter: 0.

Let me see for myself

Sumo

Possibly a world record for the most number of useless [IMAGE]s.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Toy Story

Disney must not think much of Lynx users. But they do provide a mail link to the webmaster so you can complain.

Dehance-o-meter: 0

Let me see for myself

Wilmington Online

One of the [LINK]s here actually takes you to a useable index, but with no indication of what leads where, we just couldn't be bothered.

Dehance-o-meter: 1

Let me see for myself

Wormhole

Appropriate name. Usual useless [IMAGE] and [INLINE] nonsense. There's actually a usable toolbar at the bottom, but with no indication of what the site's about, there's little incentive to waste your time moving your cursor down there (and besides, it's full of [INLINE]'s, too.

Dehance-o-Meter: 1

Let me see for myself