Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:13:00 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: current@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: lynx in /usr/src/usr.bin/lynx; any objections? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.950906000724.445A-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <558.810151918@time.cdrom.com>
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On Sun, 3 Sep 1995, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> We need a documentation browser for handling local copies of the HTML
> docs. The GNU `info' utility is nice for reading info files, but
> that's *all* it's good for and it appears that HTML has "won" this
> particular battle anyway. If we had lynx as a standard part of the
> system, any utility wanting to "bring up a help screen" would be able
> to count on having lynx around on the standard system for displaying
> ...
> Any strong objections? Any strong agreement?
>
> Jordan
Great idea! Lynx is easy to use, and the only decent Unix web browser
that doesn't require X (and since it's impossible to start up X until
AFTER you've finished installing, having a text-mode browser would be
very useful for sysinstall). As for your idea about having a universal
info reader, it should be a shell script with the Web browser defined at
the top so users can change it to (for example) Netscape once they have X
going.
Don't forget the fact that there isn't a decent X-based reader for info
files (unless you count Emacs) and the keyboard commands for info can be
awkward to use, especially for new users. Finally, the Linuxdoc SGML
format makes an excellent wrapper for manuals that need automatic
indexing and such.
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Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com
Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL
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