Re: lynx-dev Is this site intentionally preventing lynx from accessing it?

[Serge Munhoven]

Hi

No, at least I do not think on purpose.  I had already run into a similar case
(maybe even this site), but forgotten what I found out at that time.  Here is
what I (re)discovered after a lot of trial and error:  the server
(Microsoft-IIS/5.0) apparently does not like "Accept:"-headers longer than
256 characters (more precisely once the string "Accept: " plus the contents of
all such headers in the request).  Try something like:

wget -O/dev/null --header="Accept: text/html" 
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml

increasing the contents of the header (append more comma separarted mimetypes,
real or imaginary, or boringly repeat "text/html", or even more boringly simply
append spaces (!)) or repeating it several times [1].  To get the right figure
you have to account for the "Accept: */*" which wget sends anyway.  If you
enable debugging (-d) you'll see what wget requests from the server.

Note that lynx already splits it's accepted mimetypes over several headers
apparently each shorter than 256 characters (did not check the source).

Possible workaround: temporarilly rename your ~/.mimecap (and/or the global
mimecap), restart lynx and hope that it does not know that many mimetypes
by heart ...

Hope this helps,

 - Serge

[1] Most shells apparently won't interactively read lines longer than 256
characters either, so you have to put this in a file to feed it to the shell.

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