Re: lynx-dev New <BR> collapsing patch

[David Henderson]

<ESSAY AUTHOR="David Henderson" CLASS="somewhat-long-and-rantish">

There are three ways of handling comments in Lynx:  Correct, Historical,
and Minimal.  The default, as specified in the default lynx.cfg, is
minimal, which emulates Netscape's behavior, and is technically wrong.
Why?  *For convenience*, and because there are a LOT of sites that use
invalid comments.  If you want strict comment parsing, you can turn it
on in lynx.cfg or in lynx.cfg (I think).  Me, I'd rather see the
information and get it in a useful format than see a blank page and go
"Ah, this author uses a tool that doesn't know comments" and not get
the information I'm looking for.

There used to be one way of handling images:  Use the ALT, or, failing
that, use [IMAGE] or [LINK].  Then the option to not use pseudo-ALTs
was added, so ALTless images wouldn't be displayed.  Then the option to
use ALT=(the name of the image), e.g. display [space.gif] [space.gif].
At some point in this progression, the ability to link to included
images was added, so you could download space.gif and possibly spawn
an image viewer or something in the process.  Are any of these required
by the HTML specs?  Nope.  Why are they added?  *For convenience*.

According to the HTML specs, <BR><BR> has no particular meaning... if
a line is broken once, how can it be broken again?  But to get blank
lines in Lynx, one must use <BR>&nbsp;<BR> or something equally kludgy
and most HTML authors aren't going to help Lynx users out in that way.

Aside from HTML authors using <BR><BR>, many discussion areas on the web
(for example, http://www.simonsays.com/bbs/st1/secure/bbs.cgi (Star Trek
Books site) & http://chat.tnt.turner.com/eshare/server?action=120&board=7
(TNT's Babylon 5 bulletin boards, password required)) take the input and
replace [New Line Character(s)] with <BR>.  I can't read the posts on
these group with 2.7 because all of the paragraphs flow together, so I
have to keep an old copy of 2.6 around.  Sure, maybe the CGI authors
there (and other places) should have better logic on their input to
translate two blank lines to <P> instead of <BR>, but what do they know?
The two yield the same results on their browsers, so how should they
know there's any difference?  And in many places, the product was third-
party software, and the source may no be available to the current owners
to fix it.

So then why should the new patch (assuming a 3-way switch, with lynx.cfg
or userdefs.h or interactive-with-keyboard-command can be implemented) be
integrated into Lynx?

*For Convenience*.

David Henderson </ESSAY>
--
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<*> davidh at psiphi.org, davidh at imsa.edu, davidh at cyberdesic.com