Slightly off topic mini-review:
I read of a new ``lynx like'' browser on a post either here or in the
survpc group. I promptly went looking for the w3m (Japanese) browser,
found it, downloaded it, and compiled it on my ISP's shell account, for
the Sun Solaris 2.6 flavor of Unix. The english home page is here:
http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/index.html
Generally, text-based browsers are smaller and much faster than GUIs, at
the cost of not being able to see all or part of some Web pages, and
losing some of the layout and formatting of Web pages in addition to
images. This browser tries to retain the small size and speed of a text
browser, while adding some of the visual features of GUI browsers.
Its principle advantage is that it renders tables, forms, frames and
certain other ``layout'' aspects of web pages better than lynx. Indeed,
lynx does not show objects like frames at all in any recognizable sense.
W3m shows layouts much as they might appear in a GUI browser, by using a
virtual logical screen that is larger than your actual physical screen.
You horizontally pan the virtually screen with simple hits of the keys,
< or >. In my view, this is easier and better than arachne's
scrollbars, since you do not need to find the mouse or the screen edges
to scroll.
W3m also lets you pick different colors for different objects like
links, headers, etc. Since it implements colors as ansi sequences, you
can see the colors on your PC, even though the browser is actually
running on a Unix server at your ISP!
It works very much like lynx, and can be configured to have 95% of its
keystroke commands be the same as those of lynx. It has a few extra
conveniences like keystrokes that show the full URL for the current link
or current page, on demand.
However, in general, it is somewhat slower than lynx, not as convenient
to navigate, and not as mature. Its cookie facility does not work for
many sites, and lynx can generally access more pages than w3m can, even
though w3m renders the pages that it does access, better. One example:
Lynx allows you to number links and go to any link on a page by simply
typing a number. In a nicely rendered table, you may have to move the
W3M cursor painfully, link by link, column by column till you arrive on
the one you want to traverse.
W3m may let you see and navigate pages whose layouts defy the text
translations lynx uses. I have run into quite a few sites that simply
will not show certain of their links to the lynx browser. But the same
links do show up in almost any GUI and in W3M.
There is a port of w3m to win32, which means it will probably run on
win9x. But it is mostly designed for flavors of Unix. This is open
source code for the sturdy at heart.
Howard Schwartz
-------------------------------
theo "at" ncal.verio.com
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