Re: lynx-dev Bad html documents

[Philip Webb]

001007 Chuck Martin wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 11:13:14AM +0100, David Woolley wrote:
>> Whilst I know that commercial sites don't care about such things,
>> you could point out that, something like this (untested), will
>> work for everyone:
>> <a
>> onclick="openwin('http://www.foo.bar/mydocument.html'); return false;"
>> href="http://www.foo.bar/mydocument.html";>
>> My Document</a>
> I don't know very much about Javascript, so maybe you can answer this
> for me:  How does the onclick part of the above give any advantage
> for either the web page author
> or the person viewing it with a Javascript-enabled browser?
> How would it act different from leaving the onclick part out altogether?
> I've never understood the reasoning behind using Javascript
> for something that's already built into HTML.

a painful recent example for me is a piece of software created
by a tiny local company to allow people to enter data via the Internet
-- not a sensible use of the Internet in this case to start with -- ,
which contains `onclicks' for submission of data at various points.
using IE is much slower than Lynx for the parts which are manageable,
but when i pointed out to the softheads at the company
that i could in fact get round their `onclicks' by extracting their URLs
& entering them by hand, i was warned not to try it,
as it might crash their system ...
in fact, they could have set up their program to use Lynx
& made everything much faster for everyone.

i now have an upto-date computer (built it myself (smug grin)),
in which i've installed Win98, Linux & DOS 6.22 (Lilo boots all three):
i'm still using Lynx for my daily session with the newspapers,
as it's much faster & much easier to read the text
than what i get with IE; i haven't tried NN (comes with Linux)
or set up Lynx under Linux yet, so some of Lynx's speed may
be due to its running on the U's SGI machine;
nor have i tried grabbing images with Lynx to view with  xv .

Lynx remains better than the competition for most real-life purposes.

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