Re: lynx-dev When unhighlighting some highlighted links, lynx draws them incorrectly

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Klaus Weide wrote:
> > The changes were "cheap" - I just put together things that were already
> > there, and combined them with a bit of glue.  (The same way '-preparsed'
> > came into existence initially.  [ IIRC, FM commented that he wouldn't
> > have put such a developer-only feature in the code, but... well I differ,
> > taking into account the cost/benefit ratio.])   The source color stuff
>       
>     It seems that this paragraph is truncted :( 

Hmm, must have been my mistake.  To continue,  

[the source color stuff] is also cheap in the sense that it doesn't affect
non-color-style lynx at all (which should continue to be regarded as
the normal case).

I find it quite useful for easily picking out the nesting structure in
HTML source text (or what lynx makes of it), and using the same styles
as for the rendered version makes it easier to see the equivalences.
It's not good for visually picking out only the text content (filtering
out all markup), for that Netscape's coloring should be better.

Of course, if it's true that Netscape's browser doesn't understand proper
tag nesting in the first place, it cannot possibly do what lynx does. :)

Making the source colorization more fancy (e.g. netscape type display,
customization, different styles from normal display) wouldn't be
"cheap" any more, so considering the limited benefits, I wouldn't want
to put it into the lynx code.  (Or perhaps another way to put it, I'm
too lazy for that. :) ) But if this gives someone ideas for
improvements, why not.

I agree that an improved source view would better belong in some external
process.  You wrote

> Disadvantages:
>   [*]   Not all OSes have scripting languages installed or even available.

but it could still be offered as an HTTP-accessible service to clients on
such OSs.  This is the Web after all.  And if it is implemented as a CGI
script, it can be run locally by lynx via the lynxcgi mechanism, without
needing a server (on those OSs where lynxcgi works).

(Again a pointer to my example for how lynxcgi can be used to support
private URL schemes:

   Linkname: lynx-dev gettidy.sh again (v0.3)
        URL: http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0199/msg00003.html

Replace xhttp_proxy with source_proxy, and of course you 'only' have to
change what the script actually does, and you can get support for
<URL: source:http://...> [or some similar convention].)


    Klaus