2005 Text Mode Browser
Roundup gave me a reason to try out the text mode browsers
lynx,
links,
w3m and
elinks (a links fork). All the following
was done on a Debian 3.1 (testing, or 'sarge') desktop, xfree86 at
4.3.0.dfsg.1-1, and inside
multi-gnome-terminal
1.6.2-10, which has tabbed terms, split windows, scrollback buffer
search, echoing stdout to other terms and other useful
features.
Hyperlinks supplied since oddly, the Linux Journal article
doesn't.
links is a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/links, and
/etc/alternatives/links is a symlink to /usr/bin/elinks on this
Debian desktop, so I'm not testing links as such. lynx didn't
handle the css in my home site, as the table below indicates, but
the other three had no difficulty with the crummy code in the
pages. (My home site started off with all the css in each page, not
in one .css file, and I've never taken the time to simplify things.
The chattr and inillotempore.com blogs do have one .css file each,
and one page makes editing and changes much simpler.)
elinks, w3m and lynx didn't like the css in this blog: the sidebar
gets shoved way down to the bottom of the page.
My Logitech scrolling mouse scrolls pages in elinks-links and w3m,
but not in lynx. Tapping the ESC key in elinks-links brings up a
horizontal, drop-down menu across the top of the screen. The page
doesn't resize, so the uppermost line in the displayed page is
obscured by the menu. Lastly, the images in
Can you
name [Kate Pierson's Catskills motel] can be displayed with
display (/usr/bin/display), which will pop up a separate
window.
I fired up
XEmacs (21.4.17-1
here), and `M-x w3-fetch RET http://devmike.com/blog` pleasingly
displayed images inline, though the sidebar again is shoved to the
bottom.
shows hideously
oversized header fonts. Emacs/W3 seems
to be installed by default on this Debian box. I don't remember
playing with the init.el or site-start.el to install w3, and the
only init.el under /home/mike/ is in Documents/ and is the leftover
from when the machine was running Mandrake, so I doubt it gets
loaded and if it did get loaded, it'd probably get horribly
confused. The bottom line is if I ever felt the urge to run xemacs,
I could use it as a browser.
Text Mode Browser Feature Comparison [swiped from linuxjournal.com
article]
| |
Lynx |
Emacs/W3 |
w3m |
Links |
ELinks |
| Tables |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
| Frames |
N |
N |
Y |
Y |
Y |
| SSL/TLS |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
| CSS |
N |
CSS1 |
N |
N |
Y |
| Javascript |
N |
N |
N |
N |
Y |
| UTF-8 |
Y |
Y |
Y |
N |
N |