LYNX-DEV mmore from wbs.net

[Laura Eaves]

WBS sent me mail saying they won't support lynx officially, but they would look
into the VALUE= stuff in their spare time.
I then got the following message, which I'm passing along:

> From address@hidden Sat Jan 25 12:33 EST 1997
> From: Chuck Silvers <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden, address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Lynx and WBS (fwd) 
> 
> actually, I just played with this a little, and just adding VALUE
> tags to the image inputs doesn't work.  the problem is that
> the lynx-dev guy was wrong about us not using the image inputs as
> image-maps.  we actually do, but in a kind of stupid way.
> 
> If I put a VALUE tag on the first image input on our homepage,
> the URL the lynx generates for a click on that button is
>   http://wbs.net/webchat3.so?whoson=Who%27s+On
> 
> whereas the URL that netscape generates is
>   http://wbs.net/webchat3.so?whoson.x=39&whoson.y=12
> 
> (39 and 12 can be different depending on exactly where in the image
> you clicked.)
> 
> The way we figure out what to do based on a URL like this is to look
> for CGI inputs that end in ".x", which in the netscape case tells us
> to go to the "whoson" page.  Unfortunately, lynx doesn't put on the ".x"
> part of the URL, so our code doesn't know what to do.  Changing the
> way we interpret URLs is not an option since we would also have to
> change all the programs we have that calcuate stats of what pages
> we return and stuff like that.
> 
> The thing is, lynx actually "works" with WBS the way it is now,
> it's just that the buttons aren't labeled so you can't tell what
> anything does without clicking on it and then seeing where you
> end up.  it would be a lot of work to change things all around
> to allow us to make WBS work in both netscape and lynx.
> 
> one thing that could be done to make WBS easier to use in lynx
> is if lynx paid attention to ALT tags in image inputs.  this
> isn't part of the HTML spec, but netscape does it and
> it makes sense what to do with such tags.
> I know that this wouldn't help anyone using lynx today,
> but would make more sites work with lynx in the future if
> lynx were changed in this way.  (feel free to pass this on
> to the lynx folks if you want to follow up on this more.)
> 
> -Chuck

--le
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