lynx-dev Lynx and Virtual Hosts

[Peter Castine]

Dear collected wisdom,

I'm not sure this is the best list for this question, but it's the only 
one I've found for Lynx-related matters and I'm getting a little 
desperate. If there is a more appropriate list, I'll just need one 
pointer and get on my way...

Q: Are there any known issues surrounding Lynx and Virtual Hosts (as 
implemented by Apache)?


Background: I've webmastered a couple of WWW Sites, most recently one for 
a conference which I am organizing next year. I've recently had a query 
from someone trying to visit our site with Lynx and only getting a terse 
error message referring to "error.html". I'd stumbled over the same 
problem myself the night before and at first I thought it was some 
configuration problem on the Unix box I was using. I usually make a point 
of checking sites I'm involved with under Lynx, just to make sure that 
the non-graphic information is coming over in a reasonable manner.

Trying to get to the bottom of this issue, I tried a couple of other 
sites and noticed one in particular where multiple virtual hosts are 
running on one machine and instead of getting the virtual host it seemed 
that Lynx was redirecting me to the "canonical" name associated with the 
IP number. This is what prompted my virt.host question.

This is particularly disturbing because I always check my sites for HTML 
compatibility with several tools, including the W3C validator (the site 
in question is not 100%, but nothing that should cause a browser to 
hiccough). 

Anyway, if someone wants to try their luck, the site that's not liked by 
Lynx at all is:

     <http://www.icmc2000.org/>

and the site that was misdirected is:

     <http://www.transparency.de/>


Both sites respond quite reasonably to Mozilla, IE and iCab in various 
flavors and on the available platforms. 

I would dearly like to know what the devil's goin' on here.


Cheers,

Peter

----------------- http://www.prz.tu-berlin.de/~pcastine/ -----------------
Dr. Peter Castine          | The World-Wide Web Site of the 26th
4-15 Music & Technology    | International Computer Music Conference is
                           | now on-line! <http://www.icmc2000.org/>
                           | Enjoy!