[ale] How Do I Join? (text browser digression)

[Mike Harrison]

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009, Sam Rakowski wrote:

> Wow, I am totally amazed.  Are you seriously telling me that people use text
> web browsers in this Web-2.0-world!  Can you all share with me the
> advantages of text web browsing?  I have got to try it!  Now THAT's
> adventurous!

Heck, every real web interface I do gets tested in text mode.
It doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work and be 'ADA' compliant
for a screen reader.

The funniest one was I did some work for the FAA
that had to meet those requirements and was tested
by a third party, They admitted that no-one would
ever use it in that mode, but it had to be compliant.
The little web job cost them approx $5k, it cost
them another $3k to have it tested.

Our tax dollars at work.

Text browser (favorite being lynx) advantages:

-FAST-.

Works when shelled into a remote machine.
I have used links/elinks/lynx a lot to surf for and download
code/data/?? into a remote machine when I could not just wget the URL.

works well with screen readers for the blind, or people
that just like to have cnn.com read to them.

bypasses JavaScript/Flash/ActiveX/Silverlight/ASP/Java/...

works well with 'simple auth',

works great for reading HTML based documentation when shelled in
to a remote machine..

It drives GUI users insane!