Re: lynx-dev HELP NEEDED FOR COUNTERS AND FORMS

[David Woolley]

> I AM NEW TO LYNX. I AM USING LYNX 2.7 UNDER UNIX ENVIRONMENT PROVIDED BY

[ Email is easier to read if you use mainly lower case letters ]

> VSNL, INDIA. I AM TRYING TO PLACE COUNTERS ON MY WEB PAGES PLACED ON
> TRIPOD BUT WHEN I LOAD THE PAGE I CAN ONLY SEE [INLINE] ON MY SCREEN.
  ??????

Page counters are an inefficient use of network resources; a particularly
important factor for a country like India, which I believe still has 
relatively poor connectivity.  If you want to know the hit counts (and
even this can waste resources) you should ensure that your web server 
understands If-Modified-Since requests and that you can mark pages as
having a zero expiry time (look at Cache-Control: in the the HTTP 1.1 
spec (RFC 2068, I think)), and then request a summary of the server
logs.

> PLEASE TELL ME WHETHER LYNX 2.7 SUPPORTS COUNTERS AND IF YES WHERE CAN I
> GET A TEXT COUNTER FOR  MY PAGES SINCE I HAVE SUBCRIBED TO A SHELL
> ACCOUNT.

Lynx supports counters which are introduced by means of CGI, SSI, ASP etc.
generated pages, as plain text.  These involve hitting the site for the
full size of the page on every access.  Most counters done by mass market ISPs
use a GIF image which is dynamically generated and referenced from the static
page.  I guess these are about 1K.  They won't work in text only mode or
when images are turned off - only the accesses to the image are counted,
not those to the actual page.

> 
> 
> MY SECOND PROBLEM IS THAT I WANT TO PLACE FORMS ON MY WEB PAGES. BUT I
> DONOT KNOW WHERE TO POINT MY ACTION: COMMAND TO. I WANT TO WRITE FORMS FOR
> GETTING RESUMES FROM JOB SEEKERS AND AGAIN VERIFY THE INFORMATION THEY
> HAVE SUBMITTED IS CORRECT. IF THE INFORMATION IS CORRECT I WANT THE
> INFORMATION TO BE MAILED TO MY EMAIL ACCOUNT. 
> PLEASE TELL ME WHAT IS TO BE WRITTEN AFTER ACTION: IN MY FORM.

If you are prepared to restrict the choice of browsers, you can use
action="mailto:address@hidden"; - I can't remember if this needs the POST
method as well, or wheter Lynx supports this - otherwise you should
consult your service provider, as proper form handling is likely to be an
added cost option.  Unless you also specify the format of the data (and
therefore further restrict the choice of browsers), the result will be a
single line containing URL encoded data (keyword1=value1&keyword2=value2
etc., with special codings for space and some other characters).