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Re: lynx-dev TRST : the next step


From: Klaus Weide
Subject: Re: lynx-dev TRST : the next step
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 11:11:15 -0600 (CST)

On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Henry Nelson wrote:

> > Anyway, *i* am looking at Tom Zerucha's script & proxy stuff now
> > (for the first time seriously).  It is already convenient to use,
> > in my opinion (and in my situation).  Improving this approach looks
> 
> I think he did some pretty good work.  His proxy ideas (also for SSL)
> fit in well with Lynx.  

or with the Web...

> When you speak of improving, are you talking
> about making the socket handling more robust -- or whatever you were
> referring to in a message last week?

I meant, quite generally, all the kinds of changes that happen to a little
program when it gets used - and usually don't happen when it doesn't get used.
Whatever makes it more useful to the people using it (and, usually, also
makes it useful to more people).

If it is perceived as a Good Way for seeing tables, then it is bound to
become an even Better Way.  It's obviously improvable.

Whether it has the stuff to become a near-perfect solution, or (to be a
bit more realistic) to be good enough for nearly all cases, is another
question.  Even if not - does it matter?

> Despite my own liking of gawk, it does seem to be really slow, and a real
> cpu eater.  It's easy to understand for an untrained programmer, and it's
> great for chewing up logs, making formated archives and correcting tests,
> but it's probably too slow for heavy-duty table parsing as a PRINTER/
> DOWNLOADER/LYNXCGI.  $0.02.

PRINTER/DOWNLOADER requires explicit user request, and presumably LYNXCGI, too.
The user would only invoke that stuff if there is a (suspicion of a?) table.
I don't know why "too slow" would be that important.

But hey, maybe perl is faster than gawk (???), so one of those
"improvements" could be running the script through

A2P(1p)          Perl Programmers Reference Guide         A2P(1p)

NAME
       a2p - Awk to Perl translator
...
(No I don't know whether it understands gawk oer even whether it works).

> > If the script solutions look overly complicated and inconvenient and
>                           ^^^^
> > not usable for most "normal" users - maybe it's because nobody has
> > written some easy how-to-use intro, and packaged it in a convenient
> 
> You put it well.  It's all pretty intimidating for first-time users who
> have no idea what shell scripting is nor what an external application is.
> Maybe we're trying too hard, though.  Why not just turn such people onto
> MSIE or Netscape?  People who _have_ to use Lynx I think have (or should
> have) the incentive to learn.

We shouldn't care about "first-time users" *too* much.  Why?  Everyone
is a first-time user only once, but a more-or-less knowledgeable
"intermediate" user (in some sense) for much longer.  Normally for
years.

Maybe we could try harder to steer *intermediate* lynx users towards
solutions for (in this case) table rendering.  I mean users that are more
typical than "first-time users" - willing to spend some time, and try
something, to solve a problem, if there is something that looks promising - 
but more likely to do so if there are clear instructions and, um,
promises.

Something like that, anyway.

   Klaus


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