Re: lynx-dev Re: [PATCH 2.8.4dev.20] Hot place for URL goto

[Vlad Harchev]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, Ilya Zakharevich wrote:

> 
> A lot of stuff I did is enabled only for color-style lynx.  If you
> need it for a dumbed-down lynx, feel free to *port* these features
> (right now I remember only the Back/Forward pseudo-buttons on the
> title line).
> 
> The reason is that one needs a *different* implementation if no
> color-styles are available - otherwise the indicators for the "hot
> spots" on the title line will "merge" into the title.  [I hate the

 OK, I thought that there won't be any difference in implementation for
lss-disabled lynx.

> "invisible" hot spots, as those on the right of the title line, and
> the left/right of the status line.  Nobody knows about them - and
> nobody will.]

 But anyway, having user just defining some style to enable some functionality
looks horribly unintuitive to me. It's like "make your default font courier to
enable https support" to me. Also it's undocumented.
 I think it's safe to draw that arrow unconditionally (and make it always
active) - independantly of whether the style is defined. Probably there will
be need to draw some other character than right arrow - may be '='? It will be
up to the user to define style if they want more reasonable look.
 As for other invisible hot spots - we may need to make them always visible by
printing some reasonable character there.

> Ilya
> 
> P.S.  I see no reason for existence of a dumbed-down style-less lynx.
>       One can easily implement the same *behaviour* by a suitable .lss
>       file.

 Me too. I was and am an active advocate and user of lss-enabled lynx.
Unfortunately others don't use lss-enabled lynxes since they fear seldom
glitches (that are due to bugs in lss implementation) (driving by their own
or someone else's experience).
 The only excuses I remember is that lss works only for curses version of
lynx, and slang library is better (or is the only available terminal handling
library) on some brain-damaged platforms (either DJGPP or Win32 - I don't
remember). If somebody ported lss code to slang too, lss code can
be begun to be considered seriously.
 
>       Do not even mention the executable size.  With the mindless
>       the-hell-with-thinking-let's-just-code-it approach to coding
>       which pervades the lynx sources, the executable size could be
>       reduced 3 or 4 times by recoding in a proper way.  Who is doing
>       this?

 Yes, lynx is horribly coded. I don't think that properly rewriting it will
be worth the efforts though (not counting size reduction of course).


>       Thomas is trying, but he is only touching the corners.  And
>       remember the "who is needing this?" unison when I started to
>       simplify GridText.c?
> 
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 Best regards,
  -Vlad


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