Myths About Dial-Up

I'm so glad I don't know what dial-up is like. It sounds terrible. Those people stuck on it are so unfortunate.
Funny how the people most likely to say this are also the ones who aren't doing a thing to help.... If dial-uppers were always griping about their dial-up, they'd never have time to live their lives. We make do, and hearing that statement out of people's mouths all the time is really annoying.

People should wake up and get high speed!
Not everybody can get high speed. People use dial-up because they can't afford high speed, because it's not available from their location, or because it's even more expensive out in the boonies than it is in town; not because they want to inconvenience themselves.

Computers are improving so fast, it won't be long before dial-up is wiped out anyways, so there's no need to accomodate it.
Have you looked at your map lately? See the happily industrialized countries? See how they're a minority? It will be a very long time before every country in the world has high speed easily accessible to the general public. In the mean time, we should prevent class separation between nations by making our communications as accessible as possible to them all.

Dial-up users can have their dial-up, but they should be considerate of people who are up-to-date and want to build fun websites.
Not only do many dial-uppers not even choose to have dial-up, but you've got your logic all wrong. Less advantaged people should not have to be considerate of more advantaged people's needlessly throwing bandwidth around. You might as well have a country's ruler ask for consideration through high taxes so he can throw money into things that don't matter.

I can't do anything if I make my website suitable for low bandwidths.
This is simply not true. You should do your research. If you know how to properly build a website, this will not be a problem.
Remember that large files are still a fact of life. If you want to make your page aesthetically pleasing, everyone appreciates that. If your page contains links to Flash movies or large files for download, dial-up users will deal with that. The problem is when you make your page unnecessarily huge.
     Flash is cool, and websites made out of it are cooler than plain old HTML.
Are you an idiot? Flash is for interactive games and movies, not for entire websites, and especially not for anything HTML can do just as well (like displaying pictures and text).

I can't do anything because my dial-up is so bad!
Before we go any further, which web browser are you using? Is it Internet Explorer? That is the slowest web browser available, not to mention that it's lacking in the extra functionality that is useful to dial-uppers (like turning off images). If you're stuck on IE, have a look at the list of Dial-Up Friendly Web Browsers and switch (if you don't have dial-up, switch anyways, because IE is also the most dangerous browser to use). Most dial-uppers survive with connections between 14 and 35kbps. Personally, I download good sized files, and can go just about anywhere with this sort of connection. If your connection is actually lower than the average I mentioned... then maybe you're right, but a better browser may still help a bit.

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