Dear Lynx Development Group,
I was trying Lynx today to see if it could be a practical alternative to Firefox. I tried going to "
www.google.com"...but I found the page difficult to navigate, and the page difficult to read.
This has caused me to wonder: would it be possible to fix these problems? With regards to the "difficulty to read" problem, I think it's because a lot of Google's formatting, as simple and stark as it is, is lost, making it difficult to see where one search result ends and the other begins. This makes me wonder if having a "Render HTML as ReStructuredText" or ASCII-Doc, or even a variant of Markdown, would be highly useful. Apparently there's a GPL project called "Pandoc" (
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) that would be able to handle this, or at least, serve as an example of how it could be done.
My second issue--navigability--is probably a greater challenge. Tabbing from link to link is rather painful, especially even when even a page as simple as Google's now has a lot of links! And it doesn't help that SSH and PuTTY don't always play nice with the mouse. One idea that came to mind would be to divide the screen into 10x10 character squares; then arrow keys can go from square to square, and shift+arrow_key could navigate within the square.
I hope you will find these ideas at least somewhat useful. In any case, even if Lynx is somewhat difficult for me to use, I'm glad it's available if the time comes when I need to use it!
Alpheus Madsen.