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Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

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Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#91

Post by wolrah »

crazygringo wrote: post #51
susam wrote: post #38

It 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…

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…

Back in the day my 28.8k modem came bundled with a book on HTML, which is how I learned to make my first personal web site.

Even back then, the book recommended testing your web site in Lynx for two reasons:

1. Web sites are supposed to gracefully degrade when viewed in browsers without support for advanced features.

2. Accessibility matters, and while most of us don't have access to or know how to operate screen readers if we can comfortably view and navigate a web site in Lynx there's a pretty decent chance that it'll be usable with a screen reader.

It's been ~30 years since then and those reasons still apply just as well. For the vast majority of web sites which do not have any need to be interactive webapps there's not really any good reason for it not to be perfectly usable in a text-only browser, and if it's both readable and navigable in a text browser it should also be with a screen reader.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#92

Post by basscomm »

mrweasel wrote: post #13
rich_sasha wrote: post #3

How usable is Lynx for modern Internet? I would love a browser I can operate within tmux, but how does it stack against the modern javascript-laden ecosystem?

The problem, for the sites I'm interested in, typically isn't the lack of JavaScript, but how the sites layout. Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article. If you have website, which have actual content (text), it's pretty easy to ensure that it looks good and works in…

> Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article.

Wikipedia has a link at the top of the page that is labeled 'jump to content' that skips over all of the menu gunk at the top. Several other sites also do this

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#94

Post by zimpenfish »

zimpenfish wrote: post #72
andai wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Opted for Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono, Bold, at 20pt.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#95

Post by seba_dos1 »

fouc wrote: post #75
esotericwarfare wrote: post #69

You 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)

Check browsh out then.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#96

Post by philistine »

crazygringo wrote: post #51
susam wrote: post #38

It 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…

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…

I think you guys are talking across one another. You both are correct to my point of view. OP is correct that allowing websites, by enacting standards that allowed such a thing, to script their rendering was a mistake. You are also correct that the web is visual from the start.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#98

Post by giantrobot »

crazygringo wrote: post #51
susam wrote: post #38

It 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…

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…

The early web was not terminal based but that doesn't automatically mean it was "graphical". HTML was meant to be processed by any number of different user agents. A lot of early HTML tags were semantic in nature in order to convey the intent of the element. Conveying intent allows non-graphical browser, meaning everything from spiders to screen readers to AI agents, to use a page with the same capability.

People abusing HTML for the purpose of styling is the whole reason for CSS existing. A well written HTML document should have a very clean structure. The CSS has the ability to do all the crazy graphical styling. The old CSS Zen Garden was an amazing demonstration of that, an incredibly well structured and mostly semantic HTML document could have any number of crazy styles only by varying the CSS.

Bullshit HTML loaded with bullshit CSS frameworks generated by megabytes of bullshit JavaScript is a complete failure of web devs to master the medium. Unless a web page is absolutely reliant on a graphical interface (Google Maps, a game, etc) there's no reason that it shouldn't render passably in lynx. Even in those cases it should have noscript guardrails to provide at least an explanation as to why it can't work.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#99

Post by lawrenceyan »

andai wrote: post #36

Many moons ago I was on a constrained internet connection -- I set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth. I had like 2KB/s. This made most of the internet unusable, but it turns out the parts I care about are text. So I just browsed it through a text browser. This didn't really work either, because it tur…

> set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.

I had no idea this was possible. Can you explain why this works? Sounds fascinating.

Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

#100

Post by johnea »

susam wrote: post #38

It 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…

I agree with your javascript complaints, and I use a graphical browser.

I do prefer to surf with js disabled, and in most cases it actually works pretty well.

But the lack of non-js mastedon has pretty much stopped me from reading posts on the system. I can surf github, and this site, with no js, but mastedon is a no go.

The conversion of the internet into a scam ad distribution system is the primary culprit leading to the massive proliferation of js, along with the use of overly complex "frameworks" that could often be static html, I don't know what mastedon's excuse is...

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