Re: lynx-dev Danish translation of lynx

[robert bonomi]

> 
> There may be (or have been) some environments (terminals / curses
> libraries) where even the second-last position is problematic.  After
> all, writing there puts *the cursor* on the last position.  Something
> may act weird if an escape sequence is sent to the terminal in that
> state.  (Yes, I'm mostly guessing here).

Your comments jarred the dust out of the synapses.  and some of the
_antique_ terminals I had the "pleasure" of dealing with, long ago.

There were terminals that did 'auto-line-wrap' when you wrote in
the last character on the line.  *AND*, if it was the bottom row of
the screen, it would *SCROLL* the screen -- with catastrophie results
as far as knowing "what's whare" on the screen.

Then there were the units that 'used up' a character-position on the
display when you turned an 'attribute' (blink, bold, reverse-video,
underline, etc.) on, or off.

Get em both together, and the last usable "printable" position on the
line is 78.  79 has to be 'reserved' for an 'attribute', since you
can't use use 80 for anything.  And, some attributes _had_ to be
turned off, before sending a cursor code to move to a different
line.

I don't think there's been a machine made in 20 years that has that
latter 'feature'.

This really stuff I _want_ to forget.  :)

That aside, If I was designing something to work on *anything*, I'd _still_
stop at col 78. 


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