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.
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