Re: lynx-dev Vlad's suggestions

[David Woolley]

> <a> appears to be recognised within <pre> blocks;
Correct.

> <b> & <i> are recognised if you use  ^v  to get `sortasgml' a/a `tagsoup'.
<b> & <i> involve a change of font from normal to bold or italic, which
in general causes a change in character widths, so they are incompatible
with <pre> (unfortunately there is a common misunderstanding that <pre>
is merely a lazy way of putting <br> after each line, and some versions
of Netscape even fail to set a mono-spaced font).

[ various less-like features ]

> this probably runs into a problem with the way Lynx treats docs internally:
> FM -- who did much of the early work on Lynx -- used to remind everyone:
> "Lynx is not a file-viewer"; also, it's probably not worth  2  keys.

I think this is more to do with the fundamental Unix philosophy of having
lots of programs that do one thing well, and combining them at run time,
rather than having one program that makes a mediocre job of everything.
The commercial market tends to sell things that attempt to look like one
program to the end user, although internally they are probably a combination
of several programs, from different suppliers, bolted together and large 
numbers of interacting DLLs.  The DLLs are one of the reasons for bloat
and slow starting.

>   
> * floating-point numbers be allowed for INFOSECS, MESSAGESECS, ALERTSECS
> 
> what on earth for ... (raised eyebrows)?

He wants to have delays which aren't multiples of a second and doesn't 
realise there is no efficient, portable, way to do this in Unix.

> * ESC closes 'option list'
> 
> LeftArrow does it already as easily.

Also ESC causes lots of problems in recognizing escape sequences, e.g.
on some systems, especially over telnet, I've found it impossible to
use cursor keys reliably on vi.

> 
> * for novice users: ability to set start page via 'o' command.

Most novice users of IE4 never change the start page, which is normally
set to the ISP's portal page, giving them a guaranteed audience.  The sort
of more sophisticated user who does change this can easily specify it on
the command line.  If MS could get away with locking this to an MS page,
in the same way that the search button now is, they would do so.