LYNX-DEV Lynx visibility.

[Subir Grewal]

I recently had the opportunity to converse with a user who hadn't heard
about Lynx, overheard a conversation in a public area, was determined to
find out more, and ended up really liking Lynx.  Over the series of my
conversations with him (this past week), some things have coalesced in my
own mind.

1.The PC ports of Lynx are making it much more visible (I'm currently
  using an alpha of a Mac port, which is already quite stable.  This too
  will help broaden the user base).

2.The cognescenti are aware of Lynx, even if they haven't used it in a
  while.  For example, Dave Garaffa, the maintainer of BrowserWatch
  checked out Lynx again after seeing a short summary of the more recent
  features, was impressed and said so.

3.Various things may be hurting the broader acceptance of Lynx, including
  the perception that everyone who uses Lynx is of the Luditte persuasion,
  (I ran across Steve Talbott recently, an editor at ORA, who uses Lynx
  because he doesn't really want all the "latest and greatest" markup.  He
  was quite surprised when I told him the newer Lynxes provide support for
  stuff like Frames, he'd decided he didn't really care about content that
  was needlessly inaccessible).  Nevertheless, the assumption is that Lynx
  users are somehow denying the enormous benefits of graphical browsers
  (or even a GUI altogether, and they're telling me, I use a mac!).  We
  need to get the message across that Lynx is a very useful tool, not the
  right tool for all occassions, but a very useful tool nevertheless.  I
  think the 'Lynx or die' attitude does hurt us a little bit.

In essence, I think can make Lynx more visible, there are a lot more
people out there who'd beusing Lynx if they knew what the benefits and
functionality were. I'm not sure exactly how we would go about doing this,
but I think there's a lot more we can do.  For one thing, monitoring
conversations in some of the more popular newsgroups might be an idea. 
Similarly, trying to keep in touch with users is another thing that would
only help us (I still think we need a mailing list, specifically to answer
questions from users). 

address@hidden  *  Lynx 2.7.1  *  PGP  *  http://www.crl.com/~subir/
Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American:
        The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife.



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