Re: LYNX-DEV Re: Using Lynx -post_data option

[Al Gilman]

  From: address@hidden (Larry W. Virden, x2487)
  
  P.S.  Louis makes a good point in his previous msg to the list when he
  mentions that searching for info against the list archives is becoming
  less and less useful as the number of occurances of hits increases.
  I have no idea what the alternatives are to this problem though.

The basic strategy in the FAQ is to try to include a diagnostic syndrome
in the citation (the list item bearing the link to the answer) -- just
enough tea leaves so that this bullet will resonate with the user that
had the failure and he/she will try following the link.

In the case of the POST-redirected-as-GET problem, this strategy fails
because

        a) the problem is not in Lynx but in the server's HTTP implementation

        b) because the failure occurs in a part of the process the user
        doesn't normally see, what the user sees is not diagnostic.
        You have to TRACE or something to get to tea leaves that are 
        diagnostic.  

        c) even training users to validate pages that failed won't catch
        this because it is an HTTP error not visible in a single page
        of HTML.

This leads one to dream of a publicly available "pedantic mode" proxy
server that runs a process critic on the dialog flowing through it.
This would let site implementors check their servers' HTTP compliance
as well as their pages' HTML conformance.

Al Gilman
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