Re: lynx-dev Is Lynx still practical?

[David Woolley]

> The problem I see is that more and more pages are using java for non-java

You mean Javascript.

> reasons. The page designer just happened to use it because they didn't
> think about what it meant.

Although I only bookmarked it in the office, there is an ineteresting
article on web design which contranst Structuralists and Presentationist.
Unfortunately most designers are the latter, and just use the browser as
a pre-installed means of getting their graphic design on the screen.

> [As a side question, is there a public-domain pdf reader that would just
> extract the text?]

Ghostscript has tools for this.  It is not public domain (then hardly
anyhting is), but is open sourced and versions more than a year old
are GPLed.  Acrobat Reader is no cost, but closed source, and probably
does a better job.  In the limit, though, it depends on the quality
of the postscript that was used to create the PDF.  Word individually
places each character, whereas a good PDF authoring tool would output
complete sentences with an average stretch factor for micro-spacing.
With Word, the tool has to guess where the spaces are.

As pointed out in my other thread, on SVG, SVG is likely to have the same
problem (and be used on pages where the text is not written in a logical
reading order) and be included as standard in browsers.  I would guess that
this will really hit in 18 months to two years and will make Javascript look
like a minor irritation.

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