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Re: lynx-dev LYNX: it's "frames" sites complain about, not "forms"


From: David Woolley
Subject: Re: lynx-dev LYNX: it's "frames" sites complain about, not "forms"
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 12:56:51 +0100 (BST)

> My problem was that the site thought that I could not
> use frames; said that I had to download M$ or NS.

You really should know by now that this is an FAQ.

The frames standard defines a method for including a non-frames version in
the same page.  Unfortunately many sites simply put an advertisement for
their preferred browser in that slot, rather than an alternative page,
or, at least, a link to the contents frame.  As a countermeasure, Lynx
now generates links for the frames as well as displaying the no-frames
content.  (Some authoring tools generate a more neutral - "This page requires
frames but your browser doesn't support them, but its still a bad way
of doing things.)

If you get sensible content on a frames page, use it.  Otherwise
use the frames links and guess.  Only if you get "please download or
favourite bloatware" and no frames links can you start assuming that
they looked at the user agent.

> /u13/wcheung/bin/lynxtest    -useragent="Mozilla/4.04 [en]" -vikeys -cache=60 
> lynx_bookmarks.html

One of the reasons why Dejanews may not give much priority to making their
pages work with Lynx is that very few people appear to be using it, because
of the forged user agent headers.  At the very least put Lynx, or L.y.n.x.
in parentheses.  Incidentally MSIE identifies itself as Netscape and then
gives the correct id in parentheses.  L.y.n.x. ought to confuse any 
blacklisting of Lynx.

NB  If you forge the user agent with AltaVista, you will get messy pages,
because a Lynx user agent will force display of the text only alternative
page.

PS I'd strongly advise looking at a book on HTML authoring, or the HTML
specs themselves, if you don't yet know what a frames page is.  You may
also discover that the motivations of most authors are far from text mode
compatibility.

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