from Howard Schwartz:
I can sympathize with this. For all its laudable virtues, Arachne
has not been able to, or has chosen not to be able to keep up with
the the trendy upgrades, and bells and whistles that major and
commercial websites are now virtually dripping with - javascript,
jave, tons of cgi scripts, dynamically created webpages, Xml various
other enhanced (?) ``ML's'' real audio, falso audio, windows
registry required -- an on and on. My favorite is putting important
text WITHIN gif images so you an not read the text withtout a fast
DSL connection and a recent/fast OS/computer.
Happily I find my DOS (!) (and Unix) port of the text browser, Lynx,
can still render almost all the sites I care about decently. It even
has SSL encryption with forms, if you want to buy a cheezeburger over
the internet.
(snip)
Arachne has also chosen not to make downloading simple as it is with Lynx (just
type d on a link with Lynx), and I've been complaining about this for ages now.
Vertical and, worse yet, horizontal scrolling are horrifically slow with
Arachne.
DOS Lynx386 still has problems with
http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/textversion/main.html
and weather report pages linked thereto. Download stops just short of finish,
and the only way out is Ctrl-C, sometimes then the computer hangs and requires
reboot. Htget also has problems with this domain. Another domain that seems to
give similar problems is http://www.polywell.com. Problem doesn't happen every
time, I may have a few good downloads followed by getting stuck. This problem
never occurred with OS/2 port of Lynx, and never occurred with Arachne for DOS.
I haven't tried Yan yet.
On the current computer, DOS is the only OS I can run, following hard disks
crash (or was it the cable or controller?). Yan was on one of the hard disks.
Now I have only Iomega Zip 250 external on Trantor T130B SCSI, 3.5" 1.44 MB
drive, and DR-DOS 7.03, could also run MS-DOS 6.22 or 5.
Seeing the packages collections of NetBSD, Debian and Slackware Linux is
seductive. When I get the new computer, I may be well see no more need for
Arachne. Amaya arouses my interest, not to mention Netscape and the open-source
Mozilla.
I am not on SurvPC list, don't know if I could CC to that list.
