Re: LYNX-DEV Multilanguage bookmarks

[Klaus Weide]

On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, [KOI8-R] áÎÄÒÅÊ þÅÒÎÏ× wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Foteos Macrides wrote:
> 
> >     That's the point of putting a META at the top of the bookmark
> > file.  If you use Lynx with more than one display character set, you
> 
> IMHO Lynx must automatically add META at the top of bookmark file, if it
> is not present yet. Asking user of such complex action isn't nice thing.
> We'll got tons of such requests in support and mailing list if Lynx not do
> it automatically.

But it does automatically add META to the bookmark file[*], if it creates
a new bookmark file.  If the bookmark file already exists, it doesn't,
because it may have been created by a previous version of Lynx, we have no
idea what is in it.  So adding META may mess up titles that were added
earlier, and I prefer in that case not to add anything, rather than to add
the wrong thing.

[*] Noting is added if it wouldn't make a difference anyway.  At least
that's the idea.  If that doesn't work in realistic cases, please report.

The point is, 
 - People should set up Display character set and ASSUME_LOCAL_CHARSET
   to work correctly for them, before starting to create bookmark files.
   This should be in installation instructions, probably also in Wayne's
   README for the DOS and Windows binaries.
 - If there are old, pre-existing bookmark files from earlier versions
   of Lynx, they may have to be "converted".  Conversion may just consist
   of adding one META line near the top.  Or the more complex "bookmark
   from one bookmark file to another" if necessary.
   This should also be in installation instructions (and the DOS Win32
   readme; although it's less likely that there will be old bookmark
   files which need this).  
 - Users of US-ASCII-only, and users of only iso-8859-1 (i.e. that
   excludes M$ platforms for non-English?) can continue being happily
   ignorant of these matters. 


re "Asking user of such complex action isn't nice thing":

It's also not a nice thing that users have to run Lynx in environments
with different and incompatible character sets... but there isn't much
we can do about it.  And I at least don't know how to detect everything
automatically.  So users have to modify settings sometimes, that's nothing
new, and we should tell them how.

re "We'll got tons of such requests in support and mailing list"

The questions about this so far could be answered by "Set
ASSUME_LOCAL_CHARSET".  That should still be necessary, whatever gets
done with the bookmarks file.  Maybe for the DOS binary, Wayne should set
the default in lynx.cfg to "cp437", but that won't help the "Dos Cyrillic"
users at all.  I think there has to be some maunal configuration in any
case.

Waiting for your disagreement...
Maybe you want to write up some simple instructions?

   Klaus

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