Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx visibility.

[Andrew Kuchling]

> 3.Various things may be hurting the broader acceptance of Lynx, including
>   the perception that everyone who uses Lynx is of the Luditte persuasion,

        Indeed, and that's an incorrect assumption.  I'll repost
something I wrote on c.i.w.a.html: apologies if you've already seen
it.

===============================================================
Someone who has since changed his mind wrote:
: On the same subject, WHO are those people using Lynx??? I mean, most major
: corporations who give Web access to their employees are nowadays running
: graphical OSes. Could we be talking here about home users for the most
: part, using "antiquated" computers (and I say that in all respect...really)

        Or perhaps they work for a Web design firm and spend their day
writing CGI programs, as I do, and use Lynx for debugging; thus it's
easiest to use Lynx for random browsing as well.  It's *much* easier
to debug complicated sites in Lynx, because I can hit the ']' key and
view the result of a HEAD request for a document, like so:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Commerce/1.12
Date: Friday, 25-Apr-97 14:57:03 GMT
Set-cookie: AMG_sessionID=722828; path=/
Set-cookie: AMG_Source=; path=/
Content-type: text/html

        That way, I can check that the Set-cookie lines are what I
intend, that redirects are correct, and so forth.  If I'm using
Netscape or IE, I have no way of getting that information and
development is correspondingly much slower; it requires adding print
statements to scripts, or worse, messing about at random.  Lynx 2.7
also allows deleting cookies at will, making it much easier to reset
the browser to its initial state; Foteos Macrides did a superb job on
the cookie jar page, and no other browser offers similar capabilities
yet.  NS or IE require restarting the browser, which takes *much*
longer.

        Don't assume that Lynx users are necessarily unsophisticated,
or not running on recent hardware; many of us are perfectly capable of
running Netscape or IE, but Lynx may be a better fit to what we need.
===============================================================

        Possibly someone could write an article on using Lynx to debug
CGI scripts via the ']' key or lynxcgi URLs, and submit it to _Linux
Journal_ or _Web Techniques_.  Any writers out there?


        Andrew Kuchling
        address@hidden
        http://people.magnet.com/%7Eamk/
Save the Gutenberg Project! http://www.promo.net/pg/nl/pgny_nov96.html


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