lynx-dev Re: 8-bit characters in EDITTEXTAREA

[Kim DeVaughn]

On Wed, Feb 10, 1999, Klaus Weide (address@hidden) said:
|
| On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Kim DeVaughn wrote:
| >
| > What I *do* know is that if they *are* present, the submit'ed data can get
| > munged in a variety of ways, not to mention causing the cursor movement,
| > and rendering problems described above.
| >
| > Whether that is "by spec", or a "lynxism", I do not know.
|
| There's nothing that requires it and nothing that forbids it, as far
| as I know.  It just doesn't seem to make much sense.  Arguably control
| chars aren't really part of "text".  Many scripts etc. at the
| receiving end of a submission of such text would probably break
| anyway.

That was my thinking as well, when I put the filtering in.

Actually, what got me to thinking about it at all, is in an early test
of the code, I sucked a random file I had laying around into my editor,
to see how the lynx would handle having a large number of lines inserted,
and how the performance was when doing so.

So happens that the file I selected had numerous TAB's in it, and when
I returned to lynx from the editor, many strange behaviors were noted
when moving around in the now expanded TEXTAREA with the arrowkeys, as
well as ^B, ^F, etc.

I went ahead and submit'ed the edited TEXTAREA to the imdb (Internet
Movie Database), for a "format check", and what came back was terribly
garbled.

After expanding TAB's to SPACES, the same data came back cleanly after
the format check submission.

All of which led to additional experiments with other control chars,
with varying effects on lynx's ability to continue to display and move
about in the TEXTAREA properly, as well as on what would happen when
such data was submit'ed.


As may be ... I certainly don't want to filter out anything that there
would be a valid reason to have in a TEXTAREA string.  If there *is*
a valid reason to allow control chars in them, then perhaps a lynx.cfg
option along the lines of ALLOW_RAW_TEXTAREA_EXTERNAL_EDIT_CHARS is
something that could be added.

/kim