Re: LYNX-DEV unable to log in on quote.yahoo.com

[David Woolley]

> reason that it won't work, and I just am interested in knowing *why* it
> doesn't work..  and that would help lead me or other developers to hopefully
> advance Lynx so it will work on these types of links.

Positive discrimination against Lynx is the probable reason.  Either it is
actively looking for Lynx or it is running a "Browser Match" on known 
cookie capable browsers.  Unfortunately tuning HTML to the browser is 
a capability that is actively being sold by companies like Microsoft - the
aim is to give the glossiest presentation to the majority of the potential
spending market.

Generally Lynx is considered in one of the following categories:

- limited capability, so any fancy stuff won't work;

- used by a small minority, who are not big spenders (if you are complaining
  to the site, try to give the impression that you have money to spend and it
  will not go to wherever they get their income from, or that you have a strong
  influence on others who do have spending power);

- what's Lynx?

The Lynx way of tuning is to do it client side, and directly in terms
of features, but even client side tuning of pages from commercial
sites generally tests for browser and version, not features, e.g. the
recommendation from Microsoft for generating "channel" subscription
buttons is a Javascript fragment which says, is this MSIE and if so is
the version at least 4, so, if Lynx were to support channels (at the
easiest level they are just site maps in a funny syntax, but not that
far from HTML that they can't easily be parsed) it would have to fake MSIE
in the user agent string.