Fwd: Kumar Appaiah: Browsing with Elinks and using hooks

[Steve Holmes]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:00:46PM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
> 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

Well, I suppose I can't necesarily say what someone else would be
missing, but I know the ability to quickly navigate around a large
page's heading, table and form structures is something I could never
do with any text browsers.  About the only thing I could use would be
finding a unique string of text or numbered links.  the numbered links
trick is pretty good but that will usually launch you into the
targetted page; I might just wanna get down to that part of a long
page and continue reading from there.  My experience with tables in
text browsers is a completely masicurred display of content.

> 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.

Yeah, I have a script here that someone wrote that parses the weather
from the Weather Underground.  I think it parses the sequential text
extracted from elinks if I recall.  Yes, you're right, a converter
script might as well as display the converted format directly if
possible.  I was just trying to come up with a decent way to parse
table data from a text browser.  

I think that is the .mailcap you put those file handling commands, is
it not? I thought .mimetypes contained the various file type
designations.  I've used that with mutt to handle html messages
better.