February, 13 2003

Being in the middle of installing Gentoo Linux and with not much to do, I turned to the Web for amusement. All I have at this stage of the installation is a bunch of 80x25 consoles, so I fired up the text based browser Lynx.

I'm genuinely impressed at what a good job it does of rendering on a VGA text screen with 16 colours.

• Google comes up fine, though you do have to scroll a bit to see search results.
• Javablogs looks quite good.
• Most blogs, (e.g. Henri Yandell's site) are perfectly readable - some even look like they were made for Lynx.

The Lynx documentation pointed me at the HTML 3.0 specification. Never heard of HTML 3.0! 2.0, yes. 3.2, yes. But not 3.0. It looks like 3.0 was the draft that the IETF were working on when they handed over responsibility for HTML to the W3C.

My only gripe with Lynx is the user interface for filling out forms. A single wrong key pressed will lose the form for you.

So, while Charles gets into Javascript in a big way, I'm quite enjoying the other end of the technology spectrum.

I wonder what my client's architect would say if I suggested throwing out Javascript and going with a Lynx combatable interface?