Re: lynx-dev status

[Heather Stern]

I ate the fortune cookie first, then read what Nelson Henry Eric wrote:
> > who ordinarily would want to replace local Help files with distant ones
> 
> A shell account holder who has a quota of 500 Kb or less.  Someone
> who loves Lynx and wants the latest help file set even though his
> provider won't upgrade.  An installer who wants to provide multiple
> help file sets, e.g., various languages.  An installer who wants to
> discourage users from _each_ individually downloading and storing
> the file set by providing the best and latest help file set in one
> central location that all users can access.
> 
> Why not simply "Lynx help files:"?  Forget the "local".

Have to offer both.  People with a dialup internet link need a way to learn
about lynx by browsing the help pages without spending some of their costly
PPP time.  E.g. NSwin and Macintosh users, on the average... and increasingly
Linux boxes as mainstream "home" users who want to try the bleeding edge 
hear about it.

(That they may eventually hear about and become technical enough to use 
Squid or other local-caching mechanisms is *not* an acceptable reason to 
leave newbies with their first copy of Lynx in the cold.)

Now I'd be perfectly willing to use a "Help Metapage" which is rather more
indexlike than attempting to be helpful at all.  Lemme see:

   You have reached this Help page because you typed the ? key.
   Press the left arrow or (key here) key to go back to your web page.

        Local 
           Keystroke commands
           Main Helpfile (created mm/dd/yyyy by NNNNN)
           Policies for web use
        Current (from the Internet) 
           Main Helpfile _optimized for Blind Users_
           Main Helpfile              _Browser.Org_ _Europe_ _Asia_
           Default Keystroke commands _Browser.Org_ _Europe_ _Asia_
           
Anyways you get the idea, or that itself might be quite enough.  Keystroke
commands are first because I think they're the most used help aspect...
but I'll let those that code argue this one out.  Notice even with Mirrors 
listed, it's *short*.  Also it contains the obvious answer if someone
is fairly new, but didn't actually mean to hit ? yet :)    Someone will have
to fill in with what "goes back" on a terminal that doesn't have arrows 
though... I'm spoiled rotten, so even though I've used a few terminals over
the years they all had arrow keys.

It seems to me that you can't satisfy blind-readers need/preference for 
"only one link per line" and also make it compact and easy to read for 
sighted readers when material is closely related (like mirrors of the same
page).  Hard to say which would be the majority here!  So I listed that before
the more complex link lines.

I feel it's a little irrational to insist the first help page be limited to
one screenful (in the true spirit of HTML -- what size is *your* screenful?
*I* shouldn't need to care!) but the above would work for me.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         address@hidden
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