Like most people my age, my first Internet experience at home was with lynx on a Unix shell. We shared credentials for an account at the school board that we scored from a teachers aid.
It was sweet to dial into the school board (same numbers all the teachers used!) and surf around in text only lynx.
Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
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Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#72I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/
The font in the screenshot is Cosmic Sans [sic], https://github.com/gregkh/cosmic-sans-neue which was later renamed Fantasque due to hate mail.
> The font in the screenshot is Cosmic Sans
Probably Fantasque because I've (to the best of my memory) never installed Cosmic Sans (and I made the screenshot, obvs.) but I do occasionally use Fantasque for terminals.
But since the screenshot needs updating, I'm open to suggestions for what font to use this time.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Images and other media were supported from the start, they just opened in separate windows instead of being inline. The first browser ran on NeXT, graphically. It did not grow out of the terminal. And the very first publicly formalized definition of HTML in 1993 did already include the img tag: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
OP never said that the web was terminal based. He said it was text-based. Text should render fine either in a terminal or on a graphical canvas.
That doesn't necessarily hold true with rich text, though...
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#74As a web developer, everything is in the editor. A super-fast way to preview my web page changes is:
lynx --dump localhost:8000/mypage.html
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#75You can render JS only websites using chromium headless like this: chromium --headless example.com --disable-gpu --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --dump-dom --virtual-time-budget=10000 --window-size=800,600 | sed "s| | |g" | lynx -stdin
good idea, firefox headless would be my choice though (I think all chromium-based browsers should be boycotted)
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#76Been using a text-only browser daily for over thirty years now. In the early to mid 90's I used Lynx. For me, it is the worst of all the text-only browsers I have tried. I would never go back to using it.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#77Still use it in the terminal when debugging cloud applications. KUTGW!
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#78Been using a text-only browser daily for over thirty years now. In the early to mid 90's I used Lynx. For me, it is the worst of all the text-only browsers I have tried. I would never go back to using it.
So, what's your favourite text-only browser?
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#79It is unfortunate that modern web development has led to websites so complex that they either break entirely or look terrible in text-based browsers like Lynx. Take Mastodon, for example: $ lynx https://mastodon.social/ […] To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. The C2 Wiki does not load either: $ lynx https://wiki.c2.co…
> The missing spaces aren't obvious in a graphical browser due to the CSS styling hiding the issue, but in a text-based one, the issue becomes apparent.
Why would this be considered "an issue" or "a problem in your HTML"? TUI browsers are really a fun novelty and not much more, I'd be shocked if even the largest sites in the world receive more than 1000 visits per day from lynx or eww or any other combined. Unless you have a compelling reason to think that your site will be used by terminal browser fans, there is no reason whatsoever to care about how your HTML renders without CSS. Even screen readers would not have problems properly reading links not separated by spaces correctly.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really so bad? Unlike computer interfaces, the web was never text-first. It was graphical from the start. The first browser was in a GUI, not a terminal. Sites have been hobbled/broken on Lynx since the very beginning. It's neat and can be convenient to have a browser that works in your terminal for simple stuff, but the web was never designed for that. It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break…
Wasn’t lynx before other graphical browsers? I remember first using the web through a vax terminal and lynx. You could download images but had to launch a viewer.
Nexus predates Lynx.