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Re: lynx-dev \ as many times as I want


From: Jacob Poon
Subject: Re: lynx-dev \ as many times as I want
Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 16:10:42 -0400

On Mon, 4 May 1998, Philip Webb wrote:

> 980503 Heather Stern wrote: 
> > I really feel this whole "cache it yourself" - "no the app should cache it"
> > is igetting a bit overboard.  
>  
> yup & can we please keep the temperature down ... ?
> some of us like occasionally to practise our put-down technique:
> feel free to join in & stay really cool ...
> 
> i think i raised this originally & it keeps getting diverted off course.
> what i want -- & i believe a lot of other people too -- is to be able
> to hit  \  & not lose the existing rendered file: THAT'S ALL!
> people don't use  \  often, but when they do current behaviour is annoying.
> what is involved is getting Lynx to assign a different name to each version
> -- ie some character needs to be added to one of them,
> but not  \  itself, which would create problems with DOS -- ,
> so that BOTH versions can reside in the normal cache of visited links
> (i have  <= 20  cached at any one time: i read a lot of newspaper articles).

How about adding a 'urlsrc:' header to store raw version of _any_ URL, not
just HTTP? For example:

http://www.w3.org/

will have a source version called:

urlsrc:http://www.w3.org/

This will allow the sources and rendered URL contents to be uniquely
identified, and stored without platform limitations (well, at least not in
any OS I aware of).

> it looks simple on the face of it, but maybe there are technical problems
> due to the way Lynx handles things internally.
> do any of our C experts care to comment?

Caching issue is just one of the many Lynx annoyances the users have to
deal with, but comparing it to table formatting, style sheets,
Java(script), and Dynamic HTML, it doesn't seem to require as many major
changes to the sources as the latter ones, as Lynx already has cache
schemes, and the only real problem left is how to identify both versions
of an URL, and I provided a suggestion above, which is better than adding
a '\' at the end.

I don't know exactly how simple it is in code level either, but it seemed
the only reason it hasn't been implemented is because certain key
developers loathe any close resemblance to a 'broken' GUI browser or GUI
environmental ideas, even for sensible features on every other browser in
the world but Lynx.  To my knowledge, my suggestions for changing history
list behaviours and the need for NEXT_DOC command were 2 of the GUI ideas
that have never seemed to be taken seriously, even though I had provided
reasons without referring to any graphical browsers.  If Netscape and IE
had never had these 2 features, they might have been implemented into Lynx
long before reaching 2.8.

Subsequently, with the nature of lynx-dev, many Lynx users' suggestions
have been ignored by developers, especially the unofficial patches to get
around many Lynx's 'features', which most users don't (care), and even if
they do, the solutions may require exhaustive searches to the lynx-dev
archive, or the users may not have the means to do the improvements
themselves.  Table formatting falls into this category. 

(Or course, I can add the fact that lynx developers have never got paid,
but I doubt it has any relevance to caching issues at all since Lynx
developers have done much more complicated things than the dumb cache
scheme.) 

Combined with certain developers' insentivities to users' environments
(for example, the great assumption that every Lynx user should be a C
expert who should use nothing less than a 64-bit machine and some Unix
variant called 'The real OS'), caching issue is unlikely to get fixed
anytime soon unless they finally awaken from their great assumptions and
begin to drop some of their elitist attitudes towards Lynx users.

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