LYNX-DEV http question

[Laura Eaves]

I had to go through all kinds of contortions to post an html file
so it could be reached from another machine.  It seemed when I typed
a valid-looking url like
        lynx http://www.voicenet.com/~leaves/file.html
it always failed, saying the url wasn't found.
When I type
        lynx file.html
lynx prepends file://localhost/u/l/leaves/ and it works fine.

After a long exchange of mail with customer support, I
discovered that the only way to post the file successfully is to
create $HOME/public_html/ and put all the html files in there.
Not only that, but public_html has to contain index.html, and the
other files can only be reached as links through this file.  index.html is
accessed magically by typing the url
        http://www.voicenet.com/~leaves/
When I want to link to ~leaves/public_html/file.html, I just put a link
with href="file.html" in index.html.  When I select this link, lynx constructs
the url
        http://www.voicenet.com/~leaves/file.html
(note, public_html does not appear), which of course, is not the
real path of the file at all.  If you try to go to this url
directly, it fails.

Is this normal, or just part of voicenet's configuraiton?
I grepped lynx src for 'public_html' and 'index' and found nothing.

Sorry about the long explanation for a simple problem.
Can someone enlighten me?
Thanks in advance.
--le
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