[Bcc'ed [EMAIL PROTECTED] for inclusion into LG at some point.]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 11:21:52PM +0100, Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> On 12/4/06, Michael Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >does such a thing exist?
> 
> I've never personally used ELinks to edit a wiki, however
> I have heard about various problems related to the poor
> caching and encoding support of ELinks. Maybe you can
> share a bit more about any problems you have encountered?

I am assuming more that Michael meant one that displays properly in
ELinks.  Of course, this is related to the limited CSS capabilities that
ELinks currently has, but it's not all doom and gloom depending on the
wiki engine ELinks is looking at.

In my experience, Wikipedia, and other sites which use Wikimedia are the
worst if only because they're very CSS-intensive -- and don't really
give much, if any, consideration for people who use text-based browers
or even screen-readers.  If you look at the preferences page for, say,
wikipedia, the best skin to choose I have found is "Classic".  This
reduces the rather long list of options at the end of the document (the
"sidebar that wikipedia has which displays to the left-hand side in
Firefox).  Of course, the default theme wikipedia has displays fine --
it's just that ELinks renders the CSS part without positioning at the
end of the document.

Moinmoin, OTOH, is perhaps the better wiki engine that's ELinks
friendly.  If you look here:

fvwmwiki.bu-web.de

You'll note that the main options are at the top of the page instead
(because ordinarily they'd appear horizontally across the page in some
other browser).  Since MoinMoin hides any user preferences in a separate
page, and doesn't list all sorts of weirder options for you to choose
from in some sort of sidebar like wikimedia does, visually, it's much
nicer, IMO. 

Again, along similar lines is the all-perl wiki engine "UseMod" which is
very Elinks friendly, since it's a very simple wiki engine:

http://www.hantslug.org.uk

... is such an example.

Now, you're probably going to ask what you can do in order to try and
improve the look of wikipedia, aren't you?  ;)  The truth is there isn't
a lot you can do unless you decide to script replacement operations via
either Lua, Guile, Perl or Ruby.  Since I've done a tiny bit of work in
ELinks with Ruby that'd be my first choice.  Not that it matters, of
course.

Perhaps the biggest thing which annoys me about wikimedia with ELinks is
how wikimedia decides to link images.  If you look at this, for
instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel

You'll note that under section 2 there's two images, one for a squirrel
(a thumbnail) and the other for an [enlarge]d version of him.  I tend
not to care for the enlarged one, so I'll leave that as is.  You'll note
though that clicking on either one of those links takes you to a
meta-information page before you can get at the image.  I find this
annoying and so decided to link the thumbnail link directly to the
image, bypassing that page.  Assuming you had ELinks compiled in with
Ruby support, here's how'd do that in ~/.elinks/hooks.rb

``
  def ELinks::pre_format_html_hook(url, html)
    
    if( url =~ /wikipedia\.org/)
          # Handle images.
          html.gsub!(/<a href=\"\/wiki\/Image:(.*?)\"?.*?>?(<img 
src=(.*?)\s+longdesc.*? \/\>/,'\2');
        return html
    end
  end
''

I tend to leave the link for Enlarge on the page -- but there's nothing
stopping you removing it at pre_formatting time, as above.

If none of this is what you wanted to know, that's your own fault for
not being specific enough.  ;P  But I hope it helps, nevertheless.

-- Thomas Adam

-- 
"Wanting to feel; to know what is real.  Living is a lie." -- Purpoise
Song, by The Monkees.
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