Lynx

Lynx is my favourite browser... especially when it's running on 
someone else's Unix box, preferably one with an .ac.uk address and a  
55,574,528-bit-per-second connection. It gives me just the facts, ma'am, 
and no stupid adverts. 

There's a political point, too. In India, for example, mortals [could 
in 1996] get 9600-bit-per-second internet connections in Delhi, 
Bombay and Bangalore. In September 1996, the entire 
bandwidth available on all but one of the links of the academic 
ERNET was 9600 baud. Outside those cities, 2400 bits per second 
[was] the name of the game. 

And, as a Sikh from Venezuela put it to me in email from New York not 
so long ago, if you send someone in India a Word file instead of 
plain ASCII, the difference in phone charges is the cost of lunch. 
Thus is born information poverty.

So, in short, if your Web pages are incompatible with text-only 
browsers, you're practising something which is interestingly close
to information apartheid. 

By 1999, you might have started worrying about the opposite 
problem: web users with too much money and mobile internet devices.
They could be your next client... and a page which works in Lynx
works as well as WAP, the Wireless Access Protocol.

I have previously proposed that the World-Wide Web Consortium insist
that all future authoring tools deliver a sharp electric shock to 
anyone authoring Lynx-incompatible pages.


Download Lynx ... for those of you who enjoy the contradiction of clicking a button to download a text-only browser, or get nervous without graphics, here is the Real Button. I got the Lynx Now! logo from the "First Online Church of "Bob" ... and I have no idea where they got it.

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