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Re: LYNX-DEV user agent?


From: Bela Lubkin
Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV user agent?
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1998 13:31:45 -0700

Michael Sokolov wrote:

> Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1998 03:25:26 -0400 (EDT)

> > http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0797/msg00460.html

>    I have read Fote's posting that Wayne has referred me to, and I see that
> Fote was against this not because it goes against the Ten Commandments of
> Lynx, but solely because of legal bullshit. Since we should overthrow this
> shitty government anyway, that is of zero concern to me. On the other hand,
> I have some reservations of my own about making my version of Lynx save the
> user agent string.

Having read a number of posts from Fote on this subject, I know that he
was strongly against it for a number of reasons.  Two of these (and I'm
not claiming these were the strongest ones) were:

  - allowing permanent change of the user agent string could lead to
    legal problems for the Lynx developers, including Fote himself

  - it tends to remove a source of pressure on WWW content developers to
    use the user agent string in a sensible manner

If you truly revere Fote as much as you claim, you should not be going
against his strongly expressed desire.

Of course, this has very little relevance, since there is no evidence to
suggest that there ever will be an actual Sokolov version of Lynx.
You'll whip it out just as soon as you finish writing your own operating
system, building your own farm of creaky minicomputers, writing a socket
layer for DOS, and arguing about silly fundamentalist user-hostile
environments that nobody but yourself care about.  Uh huh.

Instead of investing so much energy in arguing about which useful parts
of Lynx are Eeeevil Because They're From The Wrong Coast, why don't you
actually develop some of the features you've mentioned?  Integrating
them into the ongoing Lynx work would allow you to build your own
versions with those features, plus any other worthwhile features, while
turning off anything you're against.  Going off in your own direction
will mean that you'll have to personally shepherd any new additions to
the code.  That's not going to be as much fun as you think.  Fote burned
out on it after a year and a half of "not developing, just maintaining
my own personal version", and I trust his *demonstrated* abilities as a
programmer far more than any fanciful abilities of someone who hasn't
even begun to code "his version".

>Bela<

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