Re: LYNX-DEV Question or Help: Table support ans startup on Win95.

[David Woolley]

> 1. Table interpretation
> 
> When I access one web page which includes table, Lynx does not display
> tables as it is expected like horizonally or vertically. When I looked
> at the source, Lynx seems to translate <BR> to newline/carrige return so

Congratulations!  Too few people look at the source.

> that table is wrapped wherever it has <BR>...</BR> pair.  I don't know
> exactly what version of HTML Lynx 2.7 version should support right now.
> Lynx is text based browser anyway. So I would see the horizontally long
> table in graphic environment into verillay long table. Does it make any
> sense?

Lynx supports tables, but is unable to render them particularly well.
The support works reasonably well when they are used for tables, and not
very much at all when they are used to do absolute positioning of graphics.

The reasons it doesn't support tables more fully are that it would require
a major rewrite of the rendering code (tables need to be rendered in two
passes - one to work out the number and sizes of the columns and one to
format them - in fact more passes may be needed, as almost anything, 
including tables, can be nested in a table) and it would almost certainly
require sideways scrolling.  (Sideways scrolling is likely to be seen as
intrusive by many users, particularly those using text to speech software.)

If you want to take on the job of rewriting the rendering, many would 
probably thank you, but todate, all that has been done is outboard table
formatters, which may well not cope with the more difficult forms of table.


> 2. Starting on win95
> 
> Do I need DNS setup for lynx? I am not sure Lynx itself is running on
> PPP connection. 

Yes.  For everything except file:, mailto:, news: and the internal
schemes you need either DNS or an entry for every site accessed in your
hosts file.  This assumes you are not using a proxy.  Proxies are normally
good things, unless badly overloaded (caching proxies), in which case you
only need a hosts entry for the proxy.

(Resolution of mailto addresses is performed outside Lynx.  news: requires
that the news server address be resolvable.)

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