81–90 of 113 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
We had official school pages on gopher (!!!) and the www browser was lynx.
To this day I install it on every new machine I get, especially laptops. Just in case I have to find some information on almost zero bandwidth. I don't recall having to use it, maybe once or twice in 25 years max.
But it's there if I need it.
Oh, this brings back memories of my first steps with Gentoo linux, when I failed at setting up the display (XFree86 back then) or configure it properly, I remember browsing Gentoo wiki pages with Lynx to bring it back.
Yeah, it was "links" in my case I believe. Not sure.
EDIT: One thing I am curious about, is there documentation on how to make one's website "lynx friendly". Going through my website it's pretty clean but there are a few areas (like my recipes) that could use adjustment.
[1]: https://sunny.gg
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…
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…
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…
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…
Of course the web has evolved and has uses other than reading/absorbing information (some of them great) and multimedia content is valid, but it does seem to have become harder to find substance in amongst all the style.
When I'm surfing the web it's still usually words that I'm looking for. I think that may be going out of fashion.