Re: lynx-dev why reload to save? and other questions

[David Woolley]

> 1/ When getting to an interesting page, I want to save it in its original
>  format. I must reload it using the 'd' binding. I find this most
>  inconvenient because the very reason I use lynx is to save costly
>  french telecom time.

The code isn't structured to do this and adding generalised caching tends
to bloat it when there are quite a few dedicated caching servers that could
be run on the same machine (free for Unix, probably expensive for Windows).

This is an FAQ and there is a strong lobby to have the code added by
some DOS/Windows users.  See the archives for details.

NB make sure you are already using your ISPs caching proxy.

> 
> 2/ lynx does not keep open FTP connexions, so it connects every time
>   It access a page on a given server.  This is a bummer because many
>   servers are long to accept a connexion but snappy to answer once
>   connected.

I wondered about that.  Some versions of the WWW library certainly have code
for doing this, although it can be anti-social to maintain a connection 
inefinitely, so there would need to be logic to drop connections after
a short time or if the site seemed no longer to be current.  I wonder if
it is the need to purge the cached connections that has prevented its 
inclusion.

> 
> 3/ Is there a way to start lynx in download mode instead
>   with display mode. For example I got an URL that points
>   to a binary that I want to download?

-source

> 
> 3/ When started from another tool with a wrong URL, it
>   exits.  I would expect a more gracious fail. Indeed, very often
>   everything but the last component are ok.
>   say, if I try to access   http://www.foo.org/~hacker/rpms/nerdtool-1.0
>   and that nerdtool-1.0 has been removed, I would
>   like to have  http://www.foo.org/~hacker/rpms displayed to
>   see whatever new version of nerdtool is available.

More and more on commercial sites this strategy will simply produce a
"not authorised" response.  You would probably have to qualify it with
the presence of ~.  It will probably break a lot of uses of (3) above and
other command line uses.