Re: LYNX-DEV Table support?

[tzeruch]

On Fri, 23 May 1997, Gunnar Strand wrote:

> Pete Ruczynski uttered:
> 
> > > look thro' the lynx-dev archive.
> > > goto  lynx.browser.org  to find that & search mechanisms.
> > 
> > Thanks, I will.
> > 
> > > there's a very basic problem for a 1-pass renderer.
> > 
> > Can you point me to an article which says what this is?
> 
> You need to know the width of the entire block (table) before you
> can render it. Lynx, as I understand it, can't do that. I've tried

I think lynx renders 1-dimensionally, i.e. as lines come in, it renders
the stream and decides there where to break lines.  (someone correct me if
it is more involved than that).

You don't know the width or height of a table until it has been completely
rendered.

Also, lynx cannot do a link vertically, so anchors must all be within the
same line.

It gets worse with forms which can be within one column and have a
different form in the next column.  Or start in the middle of one row and
end in the next.

> a table parser in awk, but links wouldn't work so I wrote one in Perl,
> which do give nice results on some pages (horrendous on most, though).
> 
> The best description on how to write a table parser is pressing 'H'
> and visit 'HTML 2.0'. The biggest problem with adding tables to Lynx
> is that you will have to write your own fully HTML compliant renderer.
> Sigh.
> 
> Oh, and I also found out that it won't be much more complicated to
> write the thing in C than in Perl. Maybe I'll get around to it this
> summer.

I too have an awk script, and it is huge.  There are a lot of bad HTML
things (unclosed tags, unbalanced numbers of columns, forms crossing
tables).  One version handles most links properly as long as lynx
itself is set properly (all images have [IMAGE], etc. - the rest of the
problems are with forms and bad html)

;
; To UNSUBSCRIBE:  Send a mail message to address@hidden
;                  with "unsubscribe lynx-dev" (without the
;                  quotation marks) on a line by itself.
;