Re: [Lynx-dev] Why Won't this Site Work in LYNX?

[David Woolley]

On 03/05/2022 00:15, Chime Hart wrote:
> Since I really have little understanding of user agent strings, is their 
> anything specific I can type in L Y N X to process this article

User agents have been a mess for a long time, although it looks like the 
original standard is beginning to be reinstated.

In the very early days of graphical browsers, sites used to discriminate 
against some browsers and as a result Internet Explorer started claiming 
to be Netscape and adding its real identity as a comment.  It looks like 
the latest versions still do that.

As such if you are up against browser discrimination, you just have to 
experiment, to work out the rules the site uses.  There is a database of 
them here: <http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php>, 
which looks like it isn't Ajax based.

The other big problem for Lynx, is that many sites, probably most of the 
major sites, do not send the common browsers a document, but rather a 
program which loads data and formats it into the page.  You can 
sometimes recognize these on graphical browsers, either because you get 
a placeholder format, with grey blocks for notional text, before the 
actual text appears, or by the way that individual parts of the page 
fail independently.

Of the ones I've looked at in some detail, both ancestry.com and 
Nextdoor normally operate in this way.  The main reason they might 
create a simple text version is for search engines, not for end users. 
If you are very luck they may also consider text only browsers, but 
there is probably no commercial imperative for this, as they can 
generally meet their legal obligations by creating pages that work with 
Jaws and a graphical browser.

A lot more probably do this as well.  Maybe most of the well known 
sites; I haven't looked at how the typical small business site (the one 
page sites with sections that replace each other as you scroll through 
the page) work, when it comes to document mode fall back.

From what is going on under the hood on the site you are looking at, 
they have absolutely no interest in providing a static document.  The 
site is behaving like one that is there to attract people to the adverts.