Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx Broswer...

[David Woolley]

> I'm writing an article for The Guardian (UK daily) about the use of
> "retro" broswers such as lynx and mosaic. I need a copy of Lynx so that

Lynx correctly implements, within the constraints of a character cell
display, one of the latest GUI features, <BUTTON> elements, whereas the
implementation in MSIE 4 is broken.  I'd hardly call that retro.

(For marketting reasons we were targetting a web based application for
IE 4 and the marketting people liked the idea of animated graphic submit
buttons.  As I had IE 3 on my machine, I used Lynx to proof the HTML - it
worked.  Unfortunately, when I did it on IE4, the buttons animated nicely,
but failed to send down their name and value, which made them useless,
and we had to fall back to <input type=image...>, which was never intended
to be used for buttons.)

At a rough approximation there are:

- information containing web pages - these generally pose little problem for
  Lynx, as they are generally quite clean, simple, HTML;

- vanity pages;

- commercial pages (i.e. typically created by a design consultant).

The commercial pages can be a problem.  In many cases they are corporate
image things, or glossy brochures in the standard, economical with the truth,
marketing style, and therefore don't contain useful information.
However, one can sometimes have to struggle through these parts to get
to real information in the support area of the site.  Also, if you are
dealing with Microsoft software, their site can be almost impossible to
navigate even with the latest MS browser unless you accept every offer
of downloaded software.