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Lynx - a text only browser via telnet

topic 7 · 5 responses
~terry Sun, Sep 22, 1996 (08:19) seed
Lynx is a web browser that runs in text mode. We have lynx on the Spring and you can get to it if you have a shell account. Lynx is particularly good if you want to get to the web in a telnet session. Blind folks like it because it works with screen readers.
~terry Sun, Sep 22, 1996 (08:19) #1
To find out more about lynx, check out: http://www.nyu.edu/pages/wsn/subir/lynx.html
~terry Sun, Sep 22, 1996 (23:53) #2
Lynx 2.6 has lots of new features. More tags are recognized, it reads tables, and even does host masking. And get this, lynx now has some support for graphics.
~tedchong Mon, Dec 9, 1996 (23:28) #3
Lynx is quick, sleek and useful for text-based systems, but is useless when it comes to image-map and java in web. I only use Lynx to download files and quick access to text info.
~deejoe Sat, May 24, 1997 (14:04) #4
I'm a big fan of Lynx, and find it to be the most appropriate Web browser for use with text-based conferencing systems. The following is from some email I'd sent to Terry, explaining in part why I prefer it: > > I use Lynx not because I don't have access to graphical browsers--I do, on > several PowerMacs, Sun workstations, and SGI workstations, many of which I > help maintain. However, since I rarely run *just* the browser software, the > browser's use of system resources (bandwidth, memory, disk access) detract > from the other tasks I'm working on, yet provide only marginal benefit. So, > I prefer Lynx. > I've had no luck so far posting to The Spring using the web interface and lynx, and am pretty disappointed to have these difficulties. As Terry alludes to above, Lynx is useful because it hews close to the original, more inclusive, design of the Web's software infrastructure, that documents are to be written with only content specific mark-up, and not with an eye towards how they would be rendered eventually on a given machine or browser. If there's anything that's disproven the adage " A picture is worth a thousand words" it's the growing prevalence of graphic-design elements in today's Web. Granted, good graphic design in web-design can make a page more pleasing to the eye for those of us who can see, but for those of us who can't, or who don't want to wade through all the eye candy, or who are interested enough in whatever content that we don't need to be lulled or soothed or shocked or whatever by the graphics, those graphics can get in the way of the real content. It seems a shame that sites that have loads of good text-based content in effect hide that content behind flashy gimmickry.
~terry Sat, May 24, 1997 (15:11) #5
I experienced that yesterday when I looked at a co-workers screen and saw a whole screenful of broken gifs. At first I thought something was wrong. The I realize he had gone in and unchecked the load gifs option. I'm so conditioned to seeing all the graphics that I sometimes overlook the tesxt and just get drawn to the pictures. That's why I took a few graphics off of the top of http://www.spring.com and pushed all our graphics to the bottom of the page. So what you get is pure content (even though I liked those cool pictures of springs that I've been putting up there). If you post your specific problems with lynx and our interface to the yapp conference that Dave Thaler reads, we'll work on getting it fixed. Or we'll give it a good try. I would surely like to be lynx (and blind) friendly, to use a cuddly euphemism.
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