Fwd: Kumar Appaiah: Browsing with Elinks and using hooks

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

First, as the article says at the top, he uses Firefox for some sites 
that just won't work otherwise.  I'm not advocating for the exclusive 
use of text browsers, but there are still a lot of sites which work 
surprisingly well with Lynx the cat.  I do have to disagree with the 
statement that people who still use text browsers are missing a lot.  
I've also largely switched to Firefox, but until about a year ago, I 
used Lynx the cat for 95% of my browsing.  The exceptions were shopping 
sites and cases where Javascript made up a major part of the page.  I 
still use it sometimes when it's convenient.

One area where Lynx is still useful and is often overlooked is with rss 
feeds.  It has basic support for Atom feeds, at least good enough that 
you can use them and follow links.  The rss support isn't really there, 
but it attempts to parse the xml and makes it slightly more readable.  I 
wouldn't say that Lynx the cat can replace a feed reader, but for quick 
and dirty feed browsing, it works well enough.

I would also like to disagree with the statement that a script could be 
written to call OpenOffice to read a spreadsheet.  Lynx the cat and I 
would guess other text browsers support MIME types.  If I go to a site 
and follow a link to an audio file, it will open MPlayer and play it, 
just as Firefox does.  I have to remember to use "d" to download, just 
as I have to right-click and save link in Firefox.  Therefore, all you 
would need to do is add an entry to a file (mime.types?) telling the 
browser what to do with the new file type.  You can install a command 
line converter for OpenOffice.  Referring to the below example of 
reading the table of bus routes, even though it might initially take 
more time to write a script to parse the table, wouldn't it eventually 
be quicker in the end if you could just run the script and hear the 
output immediately instead of having to use a browser?  Taking it a step 
further, what if you could then call that script as a cron job and have 
it email you?  I am not a programmer and wouldn't even guess at how to 
write such a script, but I've seen various packages for parsing various 
sites for stocks, EBay, etc.

On 9/1/2010 9:01 AM, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Sorry for the follow-up but I forgot my other big issue with text
> browsers.  I have come to really imbrase the structural navigation
> features used in Window-Eyes, Orca and other GUI type screen readers.
> Frankly, there's no faster way to get around a page with lots of
> headers and tables than to use those shortcut commands to find the
> table of bus routes, for example.  Not to mention the actual table
> navigation, itself where you can read down the fifth column of a table
> for instance.  I can't see any way to do this in elinks without having
> to grope around the whole page, listening for when a table of entries
> starts.  I suppose a script could be written to parse tha contents of
> a table and turn itinto a spreadsheet to be read with OpenOffice Calc
> but what was really accomplished with that? I might as well just pop
> intoFirefox and read it that way.
>
> For those of you who make that much use of text browsers, I really
> question how much you can actually get out of that content
> efficiently.  To me, the lack of good javascript support and
> structural navigation are near show stoppers for text browsers.
>