On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:00:46PM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote: > Hi, > > First, as the article says at the top, he uses Firefox for some > sites that just won't work otherwise. I'm not advocating for the > exclusive use of text browsers, but there are still a lot of sites > which work surprisingly well with Lynx the cat. I do have to > disagree with the statement that people who still use text browsers > are missing a lot. I've also largely switched to Firefox, but until Well, I suppose I can't necesarily say what someone else would be missing, but I know the ability to quickly navigate around a large page's heading, table and form structures is something I could never do with any text browsers. About the only thing I could use would be finding a unique string of text or numbered links. the numbered links trick is pretty good but that will usually launch you into the targetted page; I might just wanna get down to that part of a long page and continue reading from there. My experience with tables in text browsers is a completely masicurred display of content. > I would also like to disagree with the statement that a script could > be written to call OpenOffice to read a spreadsheet. Lynx the cat > and I would guess other text browsers support MIME types. If I go > to a site and follow a link to an audio file, it will open MPlayer > and play it, just as Firefox does. I have to remember to use "d" to > download, just as I have to right-click and save link in Firefox. > Therefore, all you would need to do is add an entry to a file > (mime.types?) telling the browser what to do with the new file type. > You can install a command line converter for OpenOffice. Referring > to the below example of reading the table of bus routes, even though > it might initially take more time to write a script to parse the > table, wouldn't it eventually be quicker in the end if you could > just run the script and hear the output immediately instead of > having to use a browser? Taking it a step further, what if you > could then call that script as a cron job and have it email you? I > am not a programmer and wouldn't even guess at how to write such a > script, but I've seen various packages for parsing various sites for > stocks, EBay, etc. Yeah, I have a script here that someone wrote that parses the weather from the Weather Underground. I think it parses the sequential text extracted from elinks if I recall. Yes, you're right, a converter script might as well as display the converted format directly if possible. I was just trying to come up with a decent way to parse table data from a text browser. I think that is the .mailcap you put those file handling commands, is it not? I thought .mimetypes contained the various file type designations. I've used that with mutt to handle html messages better.
