[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 02:58:01PM -0500, Terri Oda wrote:
> I don't know... I think rendering email addresses into pictures (say .png 
> instead of .gif, but to A. User it makes no difference as long as it's read 
> by the browser) is hardly something the average user can't 
> understand.  When you phone up tech support and they tell you to go to a 
> web page, it's not like the spoken link is clickable.  I'd say most people 
> are quite capable of reading something and typing it out manually if 
> clicking it doesn't work, otherwise there'd be no success in printing 
> addresses in print ads, on T-shirts, etc. and I know I've seen plenty of 
> lower-tech users type in urls from magazines.  Sure, it's a hoop to jump 
> through, but I wouldn't say that it's out of reach for anyone but geeks!
> 
> Of course, if you're talking about the javascript, that's something else 
> entirely.

Well, neither the JavaScript *nor* the picture are going to do me much
good on the two browsers I use most often: Lynx 2.8.3 in a konsole
window... and GoWeb 6 on my Palm/Minstrel handheld.

The former may not be especially mainstream, but anyone who ignores the
latter category (not to mention my blind friend's screen reader) does
so at their peril.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
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