Re: A couple of Lynx questions.

[Al Gilman]

to follow up on what Dan Rossi said:

> 1. Why is it that some Lynx do not appear when you are sitting on them?
> For example, on my home page the link "experiment" appears just fine when
> you are sitting on it.  However, when you move down one link, "Seattle"
> does not appear.  The blank spaces are there but the text isn't.  As soon
> as you move off of the link, the text reappears.  As far as I can tell, I
> have coded the tags exactly the same.
> 

This is sometimes caused by some small misunderstanding between
your actual terminal-emulator implementation and what the
computer running Lynx thinks your terminal is like.  The magic
words in that case are termcap and terminfo and lots of different Unix
implementations do it a little differently from every other.  I
couldn't reproduce the problem, for example.

Because two links that are so alike don't work alike, I am not at
all sure that it isn't an actual Lynx bug.  But it would be one
that is system- or curses-version dependent, it appears.  These
things have been cropping up as more language-flexibility and
color-adaptability are added to the code.

Try this one on Eskimo help.  If they can't fix it they may be
able to write a trouble report to address@hidden that the
authors can deal with.

> 2.  A few pages I have come across give me some annoying results.  It
> appears that they use tags to show quotation marks but instead of the
> quotation mark I see ;146 or the like. It makes it very annoying to read.
> Is this a common occurrence?  Is there something I can do to eliminate
> these tags from appearing?
> 

This one is the result of an ongoing failure to agree between Microsoft
and the Internet community.  The Windows code page uses some codes for
things like so-called "smart quotes" that are illegal in the overall
internationalization framework worked out by everybody-but-Microsoft.

When the elephants wrestle, the mice get trampled.

The Lynx programmers have so far refused to put an ad-hoc kluge
in Lynx to bash the smart quotes to real quotes because they
want to take the position "We shouldn't change, Microsoft should
change."  Righteous indignation is so much fun!

In this case, you can practice your advocacy (diplomacy) skills
with the page authors and let them know that anybody _not_ in
Windows will have ugly stuff where they think they have smart
quotes.  This may or may not motivate them to be sure to turn
smart quotes off (Microsoft doesn't make it easy) before the
start writing something that they want to put on the web.

In Word it is under tools:autocorrect:etc.  

-- Al