Re: lynx-dev Still learning about what Goes Wrong.

[Henry Nelson]

> have recently been upgraded and have become just awful as far as
> accessibility goes. A few have not one single link that works under
> lynx and I have noticed that every one of them was

I'm quite sad that more and more of you are beginning to discover what
I've been feeling for close to six months now.

> generated with Microsoft Frontpage of various versions.

A very close friend still works for M$, but now I find myself wishing M$
will lose the court battle royal.

>         One non working site was made to work when one of the
> programmers gave me another link to the material which bypassed the
> home page. It worked like a charm and I read everything that

A LOT of what's out there is like this. IF you're lucky, you only need
to manually interpret the script, by viewing source, of one or two
pages, and you can formulate the URLs you need. If a lynx-oriented proxy
server could be written that would interpret the javascript and reformat
the script content into lynx-friendly html (even a simple list of links
labeled by the if-clause conditions), I would be satisfied -- but wow,
that's a MAJOR programming job.

If you have only one page that you just _have_ to view all the time,
but it's got a bunch of front-end javascript junk, you can (if you have
the time and need) write a fairly workable script using just sed and
non- interactive lynx. For example, that freebie mail I asked about
before, well you really only need to create one URL and then re-write
the page that's given to you. You bypass the first javascript page
entirely by first giving the information they ask on that page like what
javascript you understand, login name, password, etc. They then give you
a coded URL to go to to read/reply to your mail. Sed finds the code and
writes it in usable form for lynx. All the links on the final page are
javascript, so you have to have a program (I only know awk, but as slow
as it is, it still is usable.) that re-writes the page the way you want,
listing incoming mail with the URLs to read it.

The problem is, it is VERY inefficient because one little change can
render the whole setup useless. That's why it's such a BIG job. (There
might be a market for a javascript-interpreter proxy for even GUI
browsers. It ticks me off to no end when MSIE starts doing things on
it's own (= going off to some site I really don't want to go to, or
prompting me to download some software I don't want). A proxy could put
all this up in menu form and wait for action by the user.

__Henry

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