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From The Developers...
It's sometimes easy for us as developers to forget that the rest of the world is not hooked up to the same "fast" T3 line as ourselves. The following is not applicable to CD-ROM users because the text mode is not needed there. |
Through our experiences in CoVis, we have gained a great appreciation for the difference in network connectivity between the fast connections at many universities and the much slower connections available in most schools, homes and businesses. We learned this the hard way the first time we tried to conduct a teacher training workshop at one of the schools. The web pages downloaded at a painfully slow rate, effectively rendering these resources useless for classroom instruction, which is what they were designed for in the first place.
Graphics Interface |
In light of all this, we made it a high priority of WW2010 to not only be able to accommodate the high-bandwidth connections with lots of slick and fancy looking pages... |
| but not to forget that most people are accessing our resources through much slower connections. That is why each and every page is available in both a "graphics" or "text" based interface. In "text" mode, only very small inline images are downloaded. | 
Text Interface |
A graphics-based and text-based example of the same page is shown here and the type of page that appears is controlled by the blue "User Interface" menu (left). The complete graphical representation of each page is obtained by clicking on "graphics", while in the "text" mode, are replaced by text links to these images. The appearance of the navigation menus and inline images are the features most affected by a change in the User Interface mode.
Example: Cold Fronts |
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navigation menus |