TODO List as of 2000-Apr-27 (or later)

# bookmarks internationalisation configure cookies code doswin features forms java mail standards styles tables user interface wishes NEW requests

This is a modified version of A.M. Kuchling's development page.

EMail feedback to:
lynx-dev@sig.net | amk@magnet.com | jspath@bcpl.net #

Bookmarks

(from William Denton) Would it be possible to adjust the -book option to accept a value for multibookmarks?, e.g., if multiple bookmarks are on, -book=a takes you to bookmark page A, and -book asks you the way it does now. If multiple bookmarks are off, -book=a could flash by a warning before showing the one bookmark page, and -book would be what you expect.
It would be really handy if you could choose a bookmark from the command line by it's number, ie lynx -book=30 and like a previous suggestion that used -book=a for multi- bookmark files, you could do -book=a30. Jesse DeFer <jdefer@hotmail.com> - Tuesday, October 28, 1997 at 18:19:48 (MST)

Internationalisation / Character translation

Copyright, trademark, registered symbols — These should all be in the code now. If anything is missing please report. - kw
Internationalisation -- messages in English, French, German... This is in 2.8.2dev, but still needs solid Sun support. /jes

Cookies

(Suggested by Hiram W. Lester, Jr.) Something needs to be done so that cookies can be accepted from all domains by default. There is now -accept_all_cookies and ACCEPT_ALL_COOKIES (2.8.1). Also see the cfg file
(Suggested by Rolf Puchtinger) Would it be possible to prompt users for the option to save COOKIES with expiry dates longer than "session" in a permanent file in the user's directory for subsequent sessions? Persistent cookies are implemented (but still marked "experimental"). Cookies with a given expiration in the future are saved to the persistent cookie file on exit, if enabled. This was broken in 2.8.1 though, it even saves cookies that should not be saved. (But they would be discarded when the file is read the next time.) IOW: persistent cookie storage available ('experimental') since 2.8.1, improved in 2.8.2, but no prompting for it.

Configure and Distribution

(Suggested by Hiram W. Lester, Jr.) Activate the NSL_FORK patch for as many platforms as possible.
(Suggested by someone whose name I've forgotten--Al Gilman, maybe?) Simplify the distribution as much as possible; the top-level directory is a pretty fearsome collection of directories and informational files which is confusing for newbies.
(Suggested by A.M. Kuchling) Make Lynx available in RPM format, as well as a zipped archive.
(Suggested by Al Gilman) I would like to see the H)elp files distributed with 2.7 re-formatted a little to make them more speech-friendly.
Show the GPL notice in the output of 'lynx -help'; add an HTML-ized version of the GPL to the docs. Support --version as well as -version. Add "Lynx Version x.y for $OS, built $DATE by $USER".
Further ports: Macintosh? OS/2? Other platforms? If people have ported Lynx to the Amiga or wherever, we should include the required Makefiles and patches.
Test for system binaries like gzip at runtime. Jim Spath <jspath@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us> - Tuesday, March 25, 1997 at 04:31:21 (MST)

DOS386/Win32

(Suggested by Hiram W. Lester, Jr.) Convert source code filenames to MS-DOS's 8.3 format [Done except for some VMS-only modules].

General Code Restructuring / Major Features

Lynx currently uses a greatly altered copy of libwww v2.14, which is somewhat elderly. Lynx should be upgraded to use the current libwww v5.0, and the bugfixes and enhancements from Lynx's copy of 2.14 should be provided for 5.0. This upgrade would give Lynx HTTP/1.1 capability, and would make more elaborate table support possible. (wwwlib 5 seems to be written in ANSI C, with no concessions to K&R. If that's correct, then we can convert the Lynx source code to ANSI as well---would any platforms lose by this?)
MD5 authentication support (this would probably come with libwww5.00, maybe?).
(Suggested by Christopher R. Maden) One goal that I'd like to see is a re-write of the parser. See this lynx-dev posting for further explanation.
(Suggested by Tom Zerucha) Pipe HTML through an external program before processing it; Zerucha has a script which improves table output. On the other hand, this can also be done with a simple proxy server, so maybe it's not worth the effort.
(Speculation) Move Lynx to a more object-oriented structure. (Perhaps Lynx should become something like Emacs; the C core provides various low-level functions, and contains an interpreted programming language which is used to tie everything together. Bonus: we get to flame each other on lynx-dev over which language to choose. "Perl!" "No, Lisp!" "Tcl rules." "Python's the best!"...)
Need to work on HTTCP.c to support IPv6 addresses. In particular, this line is totally crufty:
```
      if (dotcount_ip == 3) {   /* Numeric node address: */
```
Jim Spath <jspath@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us> - Wednesday, March 26, 1997 at 06:59:04 (MST)
It would be nice to cache the HTML source so that the pages are not reloaded when switching between rendered and source views. Neil DeBoni <ncdeboni@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> - Wednesday, April 23, 1997 at 13:11:23 (MDT)
lynx2-7-1: Text in the last column of the terminal. This option (in .cfg) replaces the systematic "LYcols -1" for "LYcols - LYMinusCols". LYMinusCols acts as a variable to decide what must be deducted in each case in every place that LYcols operates and works to avoid the addition of new-line to the text or when it is not required. Sime Barroso <adur@redestb.es> - Wednesday, May 14, 1997 at 05:24:20 (MDT)
Here! Here! [sic] Let me "second" a couple of the "motions"
-- Cache the html source so I can quickly toggle between that and the rendered view
-- Have -traversal also traverse any image maps it can. Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org> - Thursday, June 19, 1997 at 13:01:24 (MDT)
Re: embedded language support and extensibility:
It would be nice to take over the dev. of CTk (curses Tk) and use TCL as the embedded language. This would leverage existing code, and be useful *all over*. (TCL is designed for embedding) Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org> - Thursday, June 19, 1997 at 13:04:14 (MDT)
Doc that would be useful would be a full list of all environment variables used in lynx, along with their purpose and the platform on which they are available. If all preprocessor variables are not currently documented in the userdefs.h, then adding the missing ones would also be a useful contribution. Larry Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Monday, January 19, 1998 at 06:06:49 (MST)

Forms

It would be nice if there was vertical scrolling in TEXTAREA fields. That way you could enter more lines than ROWS=. It would be very helpful when filling out forms like this one. Brian Roberts <bgroberts@hotmail.com> - Wednesday, April 09, 1997 at 11:00:59 (MDT)
What would really help is a better implementation of the text area. Basically if one could have line wrapping as in other forms on other browsers. Having to put everything on one line or manually putting in returns makes it clunkish. Ideal would be a text window. I think this is holding back Lynx's usefulness as a front end say for things like hotmail. I would really like to use lynx as my new frontend to a message board, but I feel the users would be unhappy with Lynx's curretnt style of text areas. Jason Malstrom <malstrom@oitunix.oit.umass.edu> - Thursday, November 20, 1997 at 16:39:58 (MST)
Can you add -post_data=FILE and -get_data=FILE because currently, you can't use these options in conjunction with "-" - to have other command line options redirected in from a file for example (I don't like having -auth=id:pw on command lines for other users to look at). Thanks!
John Pappas <diskdude@poboxes.com> - Saturday, January 24, 1998 at 23:02:15 (MST)
I didn't see an option for form-based file upload. By now, if I make a form based upload page, it will be used from any other modern browser with lynx the only exception. I think we need it bad!. Lorenzo M. Catucci <lorenzo@argon.roma2.infn.it> - Friday, February 06, 1998 at 04:52:45 (MST)
Only access is through freenet. Desperately need a way to insert a blank line and/or delete a line of text in this tag <TEXTAREA NAME="Resume" ROWS="14" COLS="70" WRAP=PHYSICAL>. Running out of room in this comment form; similar problem. David Witchell <au796@detroit.freenet.org> - Friday, August 14, 1998 at 23:46:46 (MDT)
ENCTYPE="multipart/formdata" is not supported due to its complexity (Wayne Buttles to lynx-dev 981101). It seems we should support all legal URLs (at least). Philip Webb <purslow@chass.utoronto.ca> - Monday, November 02, 1998 at 12:58:46 (MST)

Other Features

(Suggested by T.E. Dickey) Status line messages should be loggable. Perhaps there should be a screen like the History Page with the last N messages, or perhaps a Nethack-like approach would be better; Ctrl-P (or some other key) cycles through a circular buffer of the last N messages.
(Suggested by Will Mengarini) Use a colon-separated list of lynx.cfg files instead of only one.
The O)ptions screen is a single screen; as Lynx's feature set expands, this limit is starting to pinch. Multiple option screens should be made possible.
(Suggested by Al Gilman) When Lynx finds a match doing a '/' where_is search, could it position the first hit somewhere _below_ the top line of the screen? (Bad for visually-impaired Lynx users, though.)

(Suggested by David Combs' Feb. 13 lynx-dev posting trace toggle: needs dribble file) Allow optionally sending TRACE output to a file, instead of requiring it to go to stderr. [Works under UNIX and 386, not VMS (?dos)]

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 98 15:22:34 EST
From: "Lloyd G. Rasmussen" 
On Wed, 21 Jan 1998 22:25:24 -0500,
Lloyd G. Rasmussen   wrote:
>I was the one who said Trace didn't work.  I'll check when I'm back in the
>office; it may have been fixed since 0.81 where I last tried it.  Sorry about
>the confusion.
I just checked, and it is working on Lynx/386, AC 108, compiled by
Doug Kaufman.  Glad to see this is working. 
-- Lloyd Rasmussen

http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0198/msg00397.html

(Suggested by Rolf Puchtinger) However, there is no option in the DIRED menu, nor in the Keymap to COPY a file (or tagged files), although cp is defined in userdefs.h. Can files be copied in DIRED mode at all? If not, please make it possible.
Bug with mailto: URLs and the TITLE attribute, reported in this lynx-dev posting.
(Suggested by David Combs, Philip Webb and others) Allow downloads to continue in the background if you exit Lynx with ^Z. (Tricky, since Lynx updates an 'X bytes of Y downloaded' as data is received.)
Add named commands, like Emacs' M-x auto-fill-mode, since we're running low on unused keys.
Add a new printing option, to mail the file, with hyperlinks footnoted (as in the 'lynx -dump' format). Add it as a printing option while we're at it...
(from Alan Flavell) For -dump, have an option whereby ordinary text is wrapped to a normal length of line, but <PRE> sections aren't linewrapped even when they are longer. (Additionally, perhaps -dump should look at the COLUMNS environment variable for its designated width, defaulting to 80.)
Would it be possible to teach Lynx to handle client-side imagemaps (a la "LYNXIMGMAP") while it's in "-traversal" mode?
These deal with the text identification of anchors containing images. The easier step would be to show [LINK to <href-value>] and not just [LINK] on absense [sic] of ALT text indication. User should ultimately be able to turn on one-level-recursive mode where hrefs to .html and .htm files would trigger GETs and the TITLE tags be extracted to be the text content of these anchors. Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> - Sunday, March 23, 1997 at 21:12:30 (MST)
It would be useful in lynx returned unique return codes based on the type of error encountered. Perhaps it could use the HTTP error codes as the basis of some of the exit values. Larry W. Virden - Tuesday, March 25, 1997 at 14:48:18 (MST)
It would be nice to have NNTP authentication. Currently lynx returns the 480 response from the NNTP server and doesn't go any further. Matthew Darwin <matthew@davin.ottawa.on.ca> - Wednesday, June 11, 1997 at 19:18:43 (MDT)
I'd like to see support for proxy authentication. Michael Riddell <mriddell@kodak.com> - Sunday, August 24, 1997 at 16:53:37 (MDT)
How about using a hardware status line (if present) for the status line? These are the hs/ts/fs/ds termcaps. Or is this too big a can of worms? Vladimir Alexiev <vladimir@cs.ualberta.ca> - Sunday, April 12, 1998 at 05:59:11 (MDT)

Lynx and Java

Support has been requested over the months for JavaScript or equivalent, the ability for the user to configure lynx to start the Java appletviewer when encountering a page with <APPLET> tags, and if we do that, then we should consider some way to support <EMBED> as well. Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Thursday, March 27, 1997 at 05:19:51 (MST)
Another vote for JavaScript (ECMA-262 standard) - this would be great! Another vote for CSS1! Dynamic HTML (ala Microsoft - a great object model) Tim McClanahan <twm@wolfenet.com> - Monday, July 21, 1997 at 18:30:31 (MDT)
We use a Java AWT implementation that works with ascii terminals. It uses a thin client protocol. Lynx can be java enabled by running an external JVM process and implementing this protocol within lynx. See the Sep 97 Dr. Dobbs TUI AWT article. I can send Java and C++ source. Stuart D. Gathman <stuart@bmsi.com> - Friday, September 05, 1997 at 19:46:54 (MDT)
Yet another vote for Javascript - I'm sick of tryin to learn new languages! UNIX Shellscript, bit of C, Perl, Visual Basic, and now javascript! I've got to write an internal diary system for an intranet featuring lots of dumb terminals. If lynx could support Javascript I can concentrate on getting better at that instead of trying to remember different aldnguarges Mark Slade <mslade@fidler.co.uk> - Monday, May 11, 1998 at 14:06:36 (MDT)

Lynx and email interface

Making arrangements so that Lynx can use an external Mail User Agent. Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> - Sunday, March 23, 1997 at 20:59:25 (MST)
Lynx will now take a Subject: header out of a mailto: URL. To complete the discussion threading through the archive, it needs to be able to pick up and run by the User an In-reply-to: value out of the new syntax. Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> - Sunday, March 23, 1997 at 21:06:44 (MST)
It would be nice if lynx could handle mailcap test parameters such as test=test "`echo %{charset} | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`" = iso-8859-8; as well as flags such as compose, edit, nametemplate, composetyped, etc. Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Thursday, March 27, 1997 at 08:03:07 (MST)

Table Style Support

(Suggested by Jim Spath) Sideways scrolling for really wide documents. (Perhaps using ncurses' pads?)
horizontal scrolling for wide documents (which was mentioned on this page), better vertical scrolling. at the moment there is only scrolling of pages, it would be fine to have a linescrolling mode. sometimes it is really anoying, when the pagebreak is somewhere in a (pre-formatted) table, and you only can see eithor the first or the second half of this table. and of course, table support markus rietzler <markus.rietzler@rzf.nrw.de> - Friday, January 30, 1998 at 09:50:03 (MST)

Standards

A common request to lynx-dev and on usenet is a table provided with lynx detailing what HTML features lynx supports and what features it does not support. Perhaps this should be based on an HTML Pro DTD or something comperable - covering Netscape and Microsoft extensions, etc. Larry Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Monday, January 19, 1998 at 06:04:58 (MST)
Support for HTML 4.x, as well as XML, is likely to become critical during 1998. Larry Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Monday, January 19, 1998 at 06:03:19 (MST)
I recently found out that the SGML declaration for HTML (versions 2.0, 3.2, and 4.0, as seen at http://www.w3c.org) has the SHORTTAG feature set. As far as I can tell, no web browser implements this fully, but Lynx comes the closest: it handles empty end tags (</>). I'd like to see the rest of the SHORTTAG elements implemented: empty start tags (<>), unfinished tags (<p<i>), and null end tags (<em/hello/). I'm willing to contribute labor towards this end. Think about it: "LYNX: The ONLY browser with complete HTML 2.0 support." Carl Muckenhoupt <carl@wurb.com> - Sunday, August 02, 1998 at 12:35:40 (MDT)

Style Support

Colour/style support. Rob Partington is working on this.
CSS1 Style sheet support.
For ncurses (and DOS) it would be nice to have a configurable set of screen colors (table driven on HTML tags) and an option for a site/user table of entity-to-string/character mappings. Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org> - Thursday, June 19, 1997 at 13:19:50 (MDT)
If different colors could be used for different tags it would make it easier to look at a particular page - e.g. if links links were offset w/ blue text and bolds, italics, titles had their own colors I think that this would be and improvement. There is VM browser called Charlotte which is similar to Lynx and has these features. Visually it's better and still is very fast since it is text based. James Littlejohn <jameslj@interlog.com>
- Sunday, August 17, 1997 at 11:03:32 (MDT)
lynx2-7-1: Mixed attributes and styles. We can mix attributes by activating an option in the ".cfg" file. A "curses" attribute is associated to each style
```
     (B = [A]_BOLD; 
      BLINK => [A]_BLINK; 
      I, EM, CITE => [A]_DIM;
      U => [A]_UNDERLINE, 
      STRONG => [A]_REVERSE, ...).
    
```
It is compatible with the current offical version with just a few changes, using (in HTML.c) LY_UNDERLINE_START_CHAR and the following character to represent the mixture of the five treated attributes (0x08 to 0xF8). The attribution comes out (in GridText.c and LYUtils.c) with the macro start_attrunderline(attrib) (#define => setattr, attrset, sl_add_attr or standout?) It has been compiled in "SCO" and "AIX" and applied to ansi, ibm3151 terminals and TUN emulator, with attributes as well as with colours. We do not have an URL. Anybody interesed in it may send a request for a full description as well as the patch to our mail (adur@redestb.es). Is somebody believes it is convenient to lend us an URL to contain this information and patch he will be welcome, and would cancel this note. Sime Barroso <adur@redestb.es> - Wednesday, May 14, 1997 at 04:34:44 (MDT)

User Interface

Command line switches

It would be nice to have a printing option to include the current page's URL in the heading of the output that lynx produces. Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Monday, April 07, 1997 at 08:04:46 (MDT)
Command-line arguments which are currently toggles should also be able to be specified as absolutes. e.g. "-show_cursor" toggles against lynx.cfg. Add "-show_cursor+" meaning "turn it on, regardless of lynx.cfg" and "-show_cursor-" with the obvious meaning. Do for all toggles. A helper function to parse these would simplify life. Bela Lubkin <filbo@armory.com> - Sunday, May 11, 1997 at 01:16:40 (MDT)
For command line stuff, a feature to set a default timeout to retrieve pages would be v. useful (it may be there, but I can't find it!) James Powell <james@go.co.uk> - Friday, June 06, 1997 at 08:05:47 (MDT)
The -crawl -traversal combination of options is SO CLOSE! I'd like a -mirror $TARGET_DIR option that did a something like those but populated a local directory tree with the sources of my target (including the images). Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org> - Thursday, June 19, 1997 at 12:55:03 (MDT)

Keystrokes

Expand the "123g" set of commands to be a more general prefixed-motion command. e.g. "123<uparrow>" to go back N links, "123<downarrow-or-tab>" to go forward N links, also accept the `vi' and `emacs' command chars, e.g. "123k". Bela Lubkin <filbo@armory.com> - Sunday, May 11, 1997 at 01:12:29 (MDT)
I would like the equivalent of a forward button. I find it frustrating to not be able to flip between a couple of pages easily. Perhaps shift-right-arrow?. Not even the history list maintains the pages you have just gone back from, so this would need to be done too. Peter Ruczynski <pete@softbase.co.uk> - Tuesday, May 20, 1997 at 08:58:38 (MDT)
Lynx should be able to bind Meta keys; I think this is absolutely necessary for the line editor (the arrows plus control-letters are simply not enough). I also want to second the request for making it possible to change pwd. Vladimir <vladimir@cs.ualberta.ca> - Wednesday, September 24, 1997 at 01:01:42 (MDT)
I'd like Lynx to support the Shift-Tab keystroke to move backwards. It could take advantage of the backtab string, which is already defined in many termcaps; see http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/faq/w3-faq_4.html#SEC4 for how Emacs-W3 can support it. My rxvt window on my Linux box does it automatically. Yeechang Lee <ylee@columbia.edu> - Saturday, March 07, 1998 at 13:09:19 (MST)
In lynx-2.7.2. the G/oto history list contains the wrong item in the case of a mis-typed URL. For example, i did "g ftp.gnu.mit.edu" instead of "g ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu". When i hit 'g' again and hit up arrow, i got "file://localhost/home/randall/ftp\.gnu.mit.edu" instead of "ftp.gnu.mit.edu", which makes it more work to correct\ the URL. (This is a summary of the message I posted to lynx-dev on 1998 Mar 07.) randall whitman <hezekiah@jun98.rahul.net> - Friday, March 13, 1998 at 21:54:31 (MST)
When I follow a link that results in an error, I would like a g lynx command to either in the buffer, or in the history of the buffer, provide the failed URL, so that I could edit it and try again. Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Friday, September 04, 1998 at 07:43:04 (MDT)

Mouse

(Suggested by A.M. Kuchling) Add support for using a mouse with ncurses; the patch is available.
Also don't forget about Linux console mouse support (gpm) patches. They are already available somewhere on shadow.cabi.net.. Hynek Med <xmedh02@vse.cz> - Tuesday, April 08, 1997 at 15:54:40 (MDT)
There's code to let mouse clicks activate links; this currently only is used under ncurses. Possibly the Mac and Win95 ports could also make use of this. A.M. Kuchling <amk@magnet.com> - Wednesday, May 07, 1997 at 13:11:46 (MDT)
lynx2-7-1: Mouse (LYgetch-mouse) with TUN emulator. It is not a "curses" mouse but a LYgetch-mouse. In our implementation the mouse generates a command LYK_MOUSE_EVENT and LYMainLoop.c treats this command interpreting MOUSE_LEFT_PRESS and MOUSE_RIGHT_PRESS. On the links it executes LYK_ACTIVATE. On the buttons executes:
LYK_NEXT_PAGE, LYK_END, LYK_PREV_PAGE, LYK_HOME,
LYK_UP_TWO, LYK_UP_HALF, LYK_DOWN_TWO and LYK_DOWN_HALF.
The edit command LYE_MOUSE_INPUT is received in LYForms.c and it is analyzed to see if is a valid click to come out of "form_getstr" and to be able to jump to the new wanted link. In "popup_options" the mouse define its position (cur_selection) and the double click to accept. Sime Barroso <adur@redestb.es> - Wednesday, May 14, 1997 at 05:36:41 (MDT)

Program commands / environment stuff

I would like to be able to change the working directory while in a Lynx session so that I can control where downloaded files go. Glenn Thobe <thobe@lafn.org> - Friday, March 28, 1997 at 16:59:18 (MST)
When using a clickable image, and providing both client and server side image maps, lynx will display the page using both [ISMAP] and [USEMAP]. You can, with ALT tags, control the [USEMAP] pseudo alt, but not the [ISMAP] one. Further, the comparatively useless [ISMAP] comes first, not second.
It would be great to suppress the generation of the [ISMAP] pseudo alt when a client side map (USEMAP) is also provided.
This was discussed on lynx-dev at the URL:
http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month0497/msg00086.html
and the consensus of those responding seemed to agree with me that the [ISMAP] should be suppressed.
Scott Scott McGee <smcgee@sol.slcc.edu> - Saturday, April 05, 1997 at 21:54:54 (MST)
It would be very useful to have, as environment variables, the current URL, the current file holding the data, and the 'better' file name when printing or downloading. Then, instead of playing with the % signs, one could just refer to the variables. Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Monday, April 07, 1997 at 09:55:20 (MDT)
How about adding the ability to set lynx to download a file that does not have a .extension, to have it download as a binary file? I have problems with this, un.exe file are courpted [sic] when they are downloaded to my ISP becuase lynx thinks they are binary. Dan Barber <xy3951@epix.net> - Saturday, April 19, 1997 at 16:31:57 (MDT)
I would love to see an expert mode whereis (ie page search) capability where I could specify regular expressions (as fancy as possible - at least GNU regex smart if not perl 5.004 smart). Right now, only caseless constants are searchable Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org> - Saturday, August 23, 1997 at 04:49:09 (MDT)
when I start Lynx without a DISPLAY-variable, I'd still like to be able to specify the display in the option-form and NOT get the following message: (for example if an X-display becomes available later) "... WARNING: Lynx is NOT configured for XWINDOWS!" Andreas Leitgeb <avl@logic.at> - Monday, September 15, 1997 at 10:07:04 (MDT)

Wishes (Miscellaneous requests)

Supposing a patron uses their modem to dial a public library, but but wants to download files directly to their own personal computer ( so that the files would not take up unnecessary space on the remote system/s) - is there a way to do this? A Public Library Patron - Saturday, September 13, 1997 at 02:25:07 (MDT)
I would like to see Lynx able to navigate Unix info files without a gateway--that is, on the fly. I've seen more and more lightweight (single floppy, double floppy, sub-100MB hard drive, etc.) distributions relying on Lynx. A facility to browse info files---especially *.info.gz files---would be tremendously useful. Bruce McFarling <ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au> - Friday, December 18, 1998 at 06:12:26 (MST)
I would like to have a tight integration between lynx and emacs. I mean lynx to be run as background process rendering pages to be used in emacs buffer. Very much like GUD makes emacs interface to GDB. Yury Onischuck <yury@buyonet.com> - Thursday, November 19, 1998 at 06:49:15 (MST)
Using Lynx it is possible to download inline graphics and view them externally but this takes time and often all you get is a graphical sepparator or bullet. It would seem possible to have a preview function to roughly display a graphic, using the whole text screen, using ASCII symbols of different 'weights' to represent the shade of grey at each point. eg .-=*[38@# You could then get an idea what a particular inline graphic was before downloading it. Michael Offord <mjo@pcug.co.uk> - Friday, February 26, 1999 at 15:45:09 (MST)

Below is a list of new requests not yet merged above.

You may suggest additional ideas if you have them.

It would be a fine thing to have a commandline-option, what Lynx's first referer should be. Some Servers behave differently depending on the referer.
Konstantin Seiler <list@kseiler.de>
- Tuesday, January 08, 2002 at 05:52:38 (PST)

Have a build of lynx as a C library, so that other applications could use Lynx to perform automated interactions with internet web sites, such as stocks, weather, or map sites. Another option would be to add a CORBA or sockets interface to interact with Lynx as a "web browser server".
Scott Brown <sbrown5@uswest.net>
- Tuesday, July 11, 2000 at 16:51:38 (PDT)

what about a lynx version for a WML rendering to use it for handheld device and cellular phones? I'm thinking of a kind of Servlet or Bean. Tks for your attention vmp!
Valerio M. Pelliccioni <v.pelliccioni@pride.it>
- Tuesday, May 02, 2000 at 10:08:15 (PDT)

Great suggestions on this page. I'd like to second the suggestions for ECMAScript, CSS, and table support. I know that not everything in the ECMAScript and CSS standards is possible with a text UI, but even basic su pport would deal with 75% of situations. Of course, user color options would be essential i f CSS is done so that bad author styles don't screw the readers. Is there a NG for Lynx discussion? I don't subscribe to mailing lists any more, sorry. Also, is there a page somewhere (akin to Mozilla's) that posts who's working on what and whe re the progress is at currently? This probably happens on the mailing list already... If I were a better hacker and had any free time, I'd help you out. How feasible would it b e to borrow Mozilla code for Lynx?
Tim Larson <tlarson@r5i.com>
- Thursday, April 27, 2000 at 11:07:31 (MDT)

I'd like to see a command that searches a document for hidden urls and merges them into t he document. Also possibly a "Submit to" command for dealing with those aggrivating forms that use javasc ript to create the submit button after you fill out the form
Josh Rollyson <dinodrac@magenet.com>
- Saturday, January 29, 2000 at 21:57:19 (MST)

Would it not be very useful to have access to UNIX Talk function via Lynx? From the menu! The Best To You & Your's, Ross ARR
M Ross <p046715b@pb.seflin.org>
- Sunday, January 09, 2000 at 15:08:31 (MST)

I'd love to see a port of Lynx to PalmOS, since handhelds/ internet devices would really benefit from having a good text-based browser.
Ken Barnes <ken@warenext.com>
- Monday, January 03, 2000 at 13:13:27 (MST)

When I want to paste information into a form, I: 1. type "\" to view the page source of the form. 2. I type "p" and save it as an html file. 3. suspend lynx, open the local copy of the form with my editor, find the <textarea> tag of the form, and use my editor to past in the text I want. Sometimes I also need to modify (or delete) the rows= and cols= attributes. 4. resume lynx, type "g" and open the local copy, and submit it. It would be nice if this or a similar process could be built into lynx.
Tom Hall <tlhall@royal.net>
- Monday, December 06, 1999 at 08:37:53 (MST)

New feature: I would like to see support for LDAP URLs (RFC 2255) added. Thanks to all for the continuing development of a valuable package.
Eric Sisson <ems@mdacc.tmc.edu>
- Thursday, December 02, 1999 at 07:20:05 (MST)

I use lynx as an efficient Web site monitor by regularly fethcing pages. Now that we're implementing an extranet, I would like to see support for SSL v 2 to allow page fetches from "https" sites.
John Hilgart <hilgarj@basf.com>
- Wednesday, November 24, 1999 at 11:49:24 (MST)

An alternate Outline View would allow collapsing and expanding heading levels and lists. This feature would aid in focusing at any desired level of detail. I would be interested in helping to develop this feature: please email me at lynxfeatures@mail.com
Marc Rubin <lynxfeatures@mail.com>
- Friday, November 05, 1999 at 15:13:20 (MST)

It would be useful (and maybe simple to do) the implementation of the FILE type of INPUT tags. That is to understand:

Lynx is Great!!!Bye!
Emanuele Paolini <paolini@sns.it>
- Tuesday, August 17, 1999 at 13:05:30 (MDT)

The info page (for a document) should be able to display the lastmod date, but it doesn't. Am I just missing the option to do this? If it's not there, how hard would it be? Quite often I'd like to see when a page was last updated, and authors don't always put this info on the page itself.
Tim <tlarson@r5i.com>
- Monday, July 26, 1999 at 12:34:49 (MDT)

Support for RFC 2052 (A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)) would be useful... it's an idea whose time has come ;-) -rt
Ryan Tucker <rtucker+lynx@katan.ttgcitn.com>
- Monday, July 19, 1999 at 18:27:28 (MDT)

The mailreader PINE has a very nice feature which I would like too in lynx : It parses each message for all what looks like an URL, i.e. mailto:bob@popsicle.org or www.acme.com. If it finds such a pattern it will be recogniced as a link and you can click on it and start your webbrowser with this address. A similar thing would be great with lynx (maybe only as an option) : if it sees something like a webaddress it handles it as if it would have been a link. Cause : Often links are not really coded (i.e.
Hans Ecke <hecke@mines.edu>
- Wednesday, July 07, 1999 at 11:50:25 (MDT)
I don't need it, but I would like to suggest a windows CE port (assuming windows CE supports console applications). with smaller and more cramped devices trying to access the internet include watches and cell phones LYNX could clean up. Although cramped devices don't lend themselves to the keyboard interface very well....
James Phillips <phillipsjk256@hotmail.com>
- Friday, June 25, 1999 at 07:45:01 (MDT)
I find it anoying when I accidently run off the front of a text entry field and I get put back several pages. could LYNX delay accepting input after going back one page? Or, I noticed it asks you if you want to go back if the text entry field is the first link in the page, could you expand that to all text-enry fields?
James Phillips <phillipsjk256@hotmail.com>
- Friday, June 25, 1999 at 07:35:38 (MDT)
As you all know webpages are often _not_ designed for lynx. Most of the problems I encounter are hidden/javascript links and bold fonts. The later are rendered as underscored text on my terminal. Try this for several hours and tell me about strained eyes. Often it is quiet easy to change the html-file to make it better readible for lynx. However it is quiet tedious : download the file, edit it, try if it is okay now, edit it again, try it again.... My solution : 1.) Implement caching of original source files to permit switching between source view and rendered view without reload. 2.) Use the editor from the options page to edit this cached file. This should be easy to implement. Now you can change every html-file you have a problem with "online". I hope I was clear with my description of problem and suggested solution. Please mail me if I was not clear enough.
Hans Ecke <hecke@mines.edu>
- Sunday, June 13, 1999 at 22:32:26 (MDT)
Often authors mark large amounts of continous text as bold or italic. Lynx shows such text underlined (at least on my terminal). This is very straining for the eyes. The following feature would be nice : If more than, say, 2 lines are marked in this way than unmark them.
Hans Ecke <hecke@mines.edu>
- Saturday, June 05, 1999 at 04:14:13 (MDT)
I read many online stories with lynx. Often this means 100+ pages in one file. It would be great if the goto-command could be enhanced to say something like "go 40 pages forward" or "go to page #73". Anyway, lynx is great!
Hans Ecke <hecke@mines.edu>
- Saturday, June 05, 1999 at 04:09:02 (MDT)
Me too. I love Lynx and it drives me crazy that something as conceptually simple as TABLES is not supported. I've tried using the TABLE conversion proxy lately and it only makes me hungry for more. Is there anyone out there working on improving the proxy and table conversion programs?
Erik Rossen <rossen@planet.ch>
- Friday, May 21, 1999 at 09:11:33 (MDT)
Hi, I've been using Lynx off and on since sometime in 1995, and have really appreciated having a text-based browser available that did most things I wanted, including some that other fancy browsers did not (e.g. crawl, traversal and dump). But now I really need to use it to browse some database generated paged. Unfortunately, they all use tables. And like the vast majority of the Web, the usage of tables is for the precise reason of aligning columns and rows. I know there are other ways to do this in HTML, and such usage might be arguably against the idea allowing presentation to be controlled by the client. But the fact remains that's the primary use of tables on the Web. I'd argue more than 90% of the usage, in fact, although maybe someone could make a good case for less than that. (I won't go any lower than 70%. :-) The point being -- Lynx's table support is virtually useless. I *know* it's going to be difficult to implement table support which will keep column and row alignment, but more than anything else, that would improve the readability and appearance of more web pages in Lynx. Please consider my plea that the priority to handle tables (perhaps with libwww5?) be raised to the top, over less widely used geegaws. Thanks, Chris Johnson Vector Internet Services Inc. www.VISI.com
Chris Johnson <chris@nospam.visi.com>
- Thursday, May 20, 1999 at 10:43:43 (MDT)
Apologies! Found command-line options in the User's Guide; I would welcome some more info. about -traversal and -crawl, though. Also found the control codes for forms; most welcome. Sorry!
Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@tiac.net>
- Thursday, April 22, 1999 at 22:34:08 (MDT)
Have been using Lynx since Dec. 96, but still don't use -traversal or -crawl, because I don't know where to find out about them. They seem to be really useful, but miserably obscure. My apologies if I missed something. (rtfm, but which m? :) Please provide easily-located links to such info! For forms such as this, the control codes seem to be miserably obscure. You might be shocked how many users backspace many words and re-type to correct an error because they don't know about ^P, for instance. I still don't know where to find all the control codes. So far, I know of ^A, ^E, ^N ^P, ^U, but accidental keystrokes suggest that there are many more. Possible that this is not a Lynx issue, though; apologies if so. Remove-bookmark command leaves a corrupted display (I have a shell account; ISP is using 2.7.1-libwwwFM(?), iirc). ^L fixes things, but it looks messy. Table support may be a bear to do, but would be welcome. // Is it too much to hope for to convince the world that Lynx *does* handle frames? :) Thanks so much for all your efforts!
Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@tiac.net>
- Thursday, April 22, 1999 at 21:40:26 (MDT)
To increase awareness I suggest a LYNX NOW! campaign similar to the Netscape/IE NOW! campaign. I also believe that LYNX should stay text-based and avoid javascript to maintain speed and ease of use.
James phillips <phillipsjk256@hotmail.com>
- Sunday, April 18, 1999 at 12:09:13 (MDT)

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