dk01 — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 10:08:42 +0000

Cookies or sessions will work. Whatever you prefer. Basically you can have a cookies.php include at the top of all your pages. When you include it the page should check for an existing cookie and if the client does not have one then it should set a default cookie (called "version" or something). Once this is set to a 0 or a 1 you can check what version of a page someone wants and do a simple string construction function. Something like this.

First lets assume that 0 stands for the text version and 1 stands for the grafical version of the site.

checker.php

<?php
$domain = \"http://www.mydomain.com\";
$dirs = new Array(2);
$dirs[0] = \"/graphical/\";
$dirs[1] = \"/text/\";

function check($type, $partialPath) { // type is binary (0 or 1)

  if ($type==$_COOKIES['version']) { //  if the page is the right version then just return
    return;
  } else { // if the user is on the wrong page direct them to the right page
    header(\"Location: \" . $domain . $dirs[$type] . $partialPath);
  }
}
?>

Then lets say you had a text version page in http://www.mydomain.com/text/bio/index.php and wanted to implement this script.

In that page you would have the following at the top of the page:

<?php
 include(\"cookie.php\"); // make sure the cookies are set
include(\"checker.php\"); // include the checker
check(0, \"bio/index.php\"); // check that we are on the correct page for our version.
?>

So yeah that's basically a rough sketch of how you could work it using only cookies. Now remember you will want to make sure you write exceptions for people who have cookies turned off. Anyhow hope this gets you started. Good luck!

Renegade — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 01:13:11 +0000

Have about sessions? Not too sure if text browsers support sessions or not, but I think they do.

Busy — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 20:44:04 +0000

And what if the screen reader or persons settings have javascript disabled and cookies turned off?

The only real way to do it is offer a normal text link to text only which can be just the .css file depending how complex the site is, and how many pages ...

If your using firefox as your browser, you can choose (from the tool bar): view/page style/no style
Opera has option to turn of tables etc as well