On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 11:08:32AM -0400, Chuck Houpt wrote:
Certainly the motivation for the patch came from a problem
encountered while building packages for multilingual systems. The
problem was that Lynx was missing a desirable feature. The patch
I guess that this is it. I don't understand what "desirable feature"
Lynx is missing wrt the patch.
Here's the typical scenario that the patch aims to fix:
Imagine a Japanese user, Ai, who knows little or no English and has
never used Lynx (she is a technical professional, and fluent in
Chinese - a likely technical lingua-franca of the 21st century).
Ai has just installed some multilingual flavor or Unix (like Debian,
Mac OS X, etc) with Japanese set as the primary language (note: this
means lynx packages are built with --enable-nls, and LANG or
equivalent is automatically setup during installation).
While browsing the available software, she runs across a description
of Lynx, and decides to try it out. She installs a Lynx package,
opens a terminal window and enters "lynx http://google.com";.
At first, things look good - Lynx launches and says, in Japanese,
"Loading google.com...", but then Google's front page appears in some
foreign language (she thinks it might be English).
Ai's first impression of Lynx: "Too bad, looks like Lynx doesn't
support Japanese web sites..."
Of course, Ai is a professional. She knows that if she digs into the
doc/config/code of Lynx, there is probably some settings, work-around
or patch. However, her first impression was bad, so she decides it is
not worth the effort. It's a shame, Ai might have found Lynx to be
very useful.
--
So the patch is not aimed at Lynx power-users - it's is aimed at new
users. The goal is to make Lynx behave the way new users expect.
Since most web browsers default the preferred language based on
locale, users expect the same from Lynx.
- Chuck
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