This site is designed to be Image free. Thanks to a "wrinkle" in Netscape, you can insert "icons" that make the site look a little more interesting without the causing the site to load at the speed of drying paint.
This incidentally also works with Sun's HotJava browser, and I heard a whisper awhile ago that Opera were planning to incorporate it in their browser.
To give you an idea of how much faster it is to browse with 'images off', Dr Hackenbush recently wrote an article for
www.freepint.co.uk about sources of environmental information on the Internet. He looked at around 75 sites - using a Sun workstation with ISDN and Netscape 4, with images on, it took an hour to check all the sites. Second time round he used a 486 with a 14.400 modem with Netscape 1.2, with images off, this time it took 20 minutes. OK, OK, so he could only access 60 sites due to problems with Javascript frames and image maps, but no prizes for guessing how he uses the World Wide Web.....
The icons used are by us are as follows:-
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Help!
To date Microsoft has not incorporated this "tweak" into its browser, although if you run Internet Explorer version 3 with images turned on it will show most of these icons. Sods law of course means that the latest versions of Internet Explorer do not have this useful little "bug" (leading someone like Victor Meldrew no doubt to exclaim "stop debugging the bugs you little buggers!")
To get round this problem we have had to sneak in some images for users of Internet Explorer. Netscape being well brought up just ignores these, whereas Intenet Explorer gladly displays them - abit like the Tabloids saying they don't need Paparazzi photos, and then sneakily slipping in a couple to boost circulation!