Enough’s enough. The World-Wide Web promises a new way to let people communicate. But too many Web designers are being bewitched by “multimedia” - they load their sites with gigantic graphics, embedded sound clips and animation.
There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But increasingly, these Web designers are forgetting to include Lynx, one of the first Web browsers, in their HTML code.
But Netscape is so cool
Yes, but not everybody can, or even wants to, use Netscape or Mosaic. Some of us are quite happy with our 286s and 386s and see no reason to spend several hundred dollars to upgrade to Windows. Some of us are blind and can’t use a graphical interface. And some of us realize that, freed from the dependence on increasingly complex graphics, Lynx offers a faster way to find information on the Internet than Netscape or Mosaic.
Making a Web site Lynx friendly doesn’t mean giving up all those snazzy graphics. HTML includes simple ways for designers to show a text message to Lynx users where Netscape users would see a picture. Text tool bars or links to text-only pages are other ways to ensure that Lynx users can navigate a site.
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I used it when it first came out all through grad school on a DEC, and was absolutely astonished when I saw a graphic (a photo) from the Web on my friend’s new PC.
Five guesses for what that first photo he showed me was.
I got involved with Lynx development by working with Jim Spath on an auto-configure script for Lynx. I have also made changes for Lynx that allow you to build it using the color support in the ncurses library. Since the release of Lynx 2.8 in early 1998, I have been acting as the patch coordinator for a group of people (including myself) doing ongoing development on Lynx. Besides ongoing support for the configure script, etc., I have done work to make lynx more robust (e.g., secure).
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However, things change. Paul Vixie left ISC in mid-2013 to form a new company. At the time, that did not affect Lynx—from ISC’s standpoint Lynx was just a box in a rack of servers. For the last four years of Lynx’s stay at ISC, I did all of the software maintenance for the project. Still, a box in a rack costs money for electricity. Late in 2015, ISC shifted away from this style of project support, to reduce costs. I expanded my website to incorporate Lynx (roughly doubling the size of the site).
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I read this that yes, it is being maintained by volunteers, principally Thomas E. Dickey. It is true that the latest stable release, Version 2.8.8, is dated February 2014, but the change log clearly indicates that “[w]e are currently working on Lynx 2.8.9” with the latest changes dated July 4, 2017, so it looks like development is active, not just a memory.
And yes, I use it all the time. A lot of Real Computers (as opposed to kids’ toys) lack a graphical interface, you know.
I use it in my linux server, because it does not have X installed, to no GUI
It works fine for the things i would use it to look up on the server, which would be text anyways.
Way way back, i used it all the time, so did everyone else at that time
Yeah, I used it often to test what the web server serves locally on some boxes. It’s more of a testing tool for me, but it still works remarkably well when you have to view a web page and don’t have access to a gui.
Very few people use Lynx. But plenty of people use other non-graphical browsers. The two main categories of non-graphical browsers are the blind, who use audio browsers, and search engine spiders. In both cases, the same things that make a page Lynx-compatible (like alt tags on images) will make them more accessible.
Lena Söderberg would be my first guess.
The Mandrill would be be my second.
Random porn my third.
It has been ages since I used Lynx, but when I needed it, it was the only viable option. Configuring random devices via their web interface using Lynx is something that can get out out of trouble.
I run … let me check … version 2.8.9dev.8 (21 Dec 2015) on those few servers I have only terminal access to. It’s perfectly fine for what I need (mostly checking how to do things) - most of those sites are fairly Lynx-friendly
I used it a few months ago to setup a fun little headless network boxette.
I needed to load new firmware and utilities onto it from the Net. The site that hosted the files had switched to https so the simple wget listed in the how-tos no longer worked.
Lynx to the rescue.
And that’s not the only time in the past year. All involving headless boxettes. (In those cases Pi Zeros.)
I also installed and tested Mosaic on my main box recently. It crashed on most sites. It’s rather astonishing it starts up on Windows 7 at all.
(Hmm, testing the Dope. Error response from server. But at least it didn’t crash.
Testing the Dope on Lynx under Cygwin. Functional but the resulting psychedelic text coloring! Horrible to look at. Where’s the **** configuration file?)
OK, Lena I know*, but what’s the Mandrill? Google brings up plenty of images of the colorful-faced primate, but I’m not seeing anything that would be an iconic image from the early days of the Web.
*for those who don’t know, some early researcher in image processing used a scan of Playboy centerfold Lena Söderberg (cropped enough to be SFW) as a test image, and the image caught on to the point that it was used by people who didn’t even realize the origin. Playboy could have asserted their copyright and forbidden its use, but by the time they realized, it was already so widespread that they instead bowed to the inevitable.
That image seemed to be pretty widespread in use back when computer graphics were just starting to become photorealistic. I wouldn’t say it was really relevant to early web, more early computer graphics capabilities.
Lena, the Utah teapot, the mandrill, and sundry other graphics icons are gathered in this repository.
Wiki has an entry on Lena (“Lenna”); full nsfw shot and photo of her in 1997 (Year of the Manifesto!) here; IEEE itself dubbed her “an information age Madonna.”
The answer, BTW, to OP challenge was #3, random porn.
Porn was going to be my guess, too, and was going to be disappointed if it wasn’t the correct answer. That said, while I’m familiar with the mandrill image, I had no idea about Lena (or even who she was), so the aside was educational for me.
Yes! We use it multiple times a day. We use it to download research articles from outside a firewall and then mail it to ourselves- it is simpler than opening up a vpn or tunnel.
By far, the biggest user of a non-graphical browser is Google!
Their search algorithm scans the web constantly, and is quite non-graphical, looking only at the content (text) of websites and the links to/from them to determine placement in their search results.
And search engines like Google, etc. are a very important part of the internet.