lynx-dev improving documentation

[Philip Webb]

does anyone else feel there's too much obsolete material
in the Lynx distribution package?  or that we should try to improve
documentation in modest ways to make Lynx easier to maintain
& encourage new people to get into bits of programming?
i would like to practise & learn with bits of coding, but am intimidated
by what adds up to  69 545  lines in the  .c  files in  /src ,
quite apart from the WWW stuff elsewhere & all the  .h  files.

eg there's CHANGES files going back to the Roman Empire or nearly
&  .announce  documents which by now are very stale news;
there's a document on IBM-PCs & character sets,
which may be useful in some contexts, but looks rather dated
& in fact for me would have been rather misleading (see below).

also, the  .c  files themselves have minimal & very varied introductions,
ranging from  LYCookie.c , whose todo list is relevant to a recent thread,
down to the  23  files which have no introductory comments at all.
could anyone who feels familiar with the functions of these files
within the Lynx corpus possibly find the time to add eg  10 lines
-- & perhaps edit the others which do have intro's -- ,
advising everyone what each does?  GridText.c  tells us only
"Character grid hypertext object", whatever that means,
whereas  LYMap.c  says helpfully "Lynx Client-side Image MAP Support"
&  LYTraversal.c  says "routines to handle special traversal feature".
i've printed them in a file, if anyone would like to see them neatly.

OTOH i've finally stumbled on the extremely simple correction needed
to allow me to read accented letter in French & German:
ALL it needed was  set display 8-bit  in my  mskermit.ini  in my PC,
which pretends to be a VT100 for our UNIX system.
i had always assumed there would be a big problem
due to the difference between ISO coding & DOS codepages
& the IBM-PC file in the  /docs  directory in the distribution
adds to that impression; i'm still puzzled how it can be so simple,
but maybe it's merely the combination of VT100 emulation & Kermit,
which between them sort things out.

i'm very conscious of the current lack of programmer time out there
& would like to get a bit closer to actual bits of programming myself.
i'ld say a small amount of effort in tidying up the distribution package
& the commenting of the actual source files would go a long way
towards ensuring Lynx remains viable for maintenance & development.

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