Kairos and Hypertext '05

In the e-mail this morning:

Dear Prof. Fagerjord, We are happy to inform you that your paper has been accepted to ACM Hypertext 2005. Congratulations!

The four (!) reviewers were nice and positive, and all voted for acceptance, even though "the content is not earth-shaking," as one reveiwer noted.

My piece is a hypertext, and I am pleased that one reviewer found that "[t]he hypertext presentation is sound (if not particularly daring)," as that was exactly my aim: a friendly hypertext.

A few weeks ago, I also got the message that another hypertext essay is accepted for Kairos Coverweb 10.1. Yay! I'm getting published!

One thing that makes me curious, however: How dare reviewers read hypertext research in old browsers? I had comments both on my paper for Kairos and this one for Hypertext about how the hypertext didn't work in ancient browsers. Of course it is a good thing to make things degrade properly, but we cant push the research forward if everything must work in Mosaic 2.3! One reviewer couldn't get anything that relied on the DOM model to work, which means that his or her browser was from before 2002 at the very latest. IE 5 from 1999 supports some of the DOM. A hypertext reviewer commented on some quirks in exactly IE5, and then on Opera 5. Both browsers are more than five years old!

If I were to review a work which I assumed the author had put some effort into and it didn't work in my browser, I would of course upgrade to the latest version of a good browser and try again. Isn't that the decent thing to do?

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a thought

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full papers at hypertext '05