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Re: non-mainstream web (browsers)

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>>>>> On 2025-08-09, Doc O'Leary wrote:
>>>>> For your reference, records indicate that Ivan Shmakov wrote:

	I took the liberty of removing comp.lang.forth from Newsgroups:
	as this discussion would be off-topic there.

 >> By the by, I’d like to note that the lifestyle argument works both
 >> ways.  I’ve started using web c. 1998, and within a few years,
 >> settled on Lynx as my primary browser.  (I have a Lynx “bookmarks”
 >> file dated August 2001, for example.)  I doubt indoor plumbing is
 >> a suitable comparison, but driving a car perhaps is.

 > Well, by that analogy, what do you think would happen if you tried
 > to take a Ford Model T on to the Autobahn?

	Either I do not understand your point, or you’ve misunderstood
	the one I’ve tried to make.  The thing is: for a variety of
	reasons, whether they want it or not, different people live
	different lives.

	Think of, say, people living in different parts of the world.

	In this case, why should I be concerned with my inability to
	take my Ford Model T (let’s suppose, for the sake of this
	argument, that I do have one) to the Autobahn, when we do not
	have the Autobahn here in the first place?  (Why, /billions/
	of people in the world don’t have the Autobahn anywhere near.)

	We do have decent mass transit, though, and that’s what I’m
	happily using.  Yet I understand it well enough that in some
	parts of the world people do not have such amenities and have
	to resort to having a car to get to their workplace and back.

	Kind of ‘to each their own’, if not quite that.

 > The modern web is a “kitchen sink” mess of technologies (well beyond
 > JavaScript) that is going to be heavy lift for any browser to support:

	Analoguously, the modern Earth is a “kitchen sink” mess of
	human languages that is going to be heavy lift for any human
	to learn.  Настоящее Вавилонское столпотворение!  Должно ли,
	однако, /меня/ волновать то, что я не владею, к примеру,
	албанским, испанским и (или) китайским?  Я пишу на двух, и, как
	мне кажется, владею еще одним на уровне read-only.  Хотелось
	бы освоить еще три-четыре, но, увы, с возрастом такого рода
	подвиги appear to become harder to achieve.  So there.

 > <https://www.w3.org/TR/>

	I do not consider W3C to be a relevant authority when it comes
	to /interoperability,/ which is to say, having more than two
	independent implementations of a technology or stack.

	FWIW, my go-to sources about web, or, rather, the parts of web
	I’m interested in, are:

http://html.spec.whatwg.org/
http://rfc-editor.org/ (particularly IETF STD 99 / RFC 9112)
http://262.ecma-international.org/ (particularly 5.1 and 6.0)

	About the only thing I refer to W3C for is CSS specifications.

 > For example, I have sites that make extensive use of server sent
 > events (SSE).  While JavaScript is the main way to pull the data,
 > the format *is* just text that any browser could display.  But give
 > `lynx` that URL and it just *sits* on the result, displaying
 > *nothing* until the connection is closed.

	Indeed, Lynx does not implement HTTP/1.1 in full, which is
	apparently what SSE requires [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_sent_events

	More importantly, am /I/ part of your target audience?  If so,
	I fully expect for your website(s) to be accessible to a user
	agent implementing HTTP/1.1 and HTML Living Standard.  It’s my
	responsibility to ensure that my UA supports them, and work
	around whatever issues it might have with that.  (Say, when
	Lynx stumbles on chunked encoding, I might use Wget to download
	the resource first, and pass it as a local file to Lynx then.)

	If your website requires anything besides that (CSS, JS,
	WebRTC, – whatever) to be usable, I might complain. 

	If I’m /not/ part of your target audience, why bother?

	By the same merit, if my grandmother is part of your target
	audience, I fully expect for your website(s) to be written in
	German or (and) Russian.  I’m afraid that regardless of how
	good your website might be, she’s not at an age when learning
	English, or any other new language, is still a viable option.

	Otherwise, we might complain.  Sometimes, it /does/ help.

	For an example, an IRC pal of mine once complained to website
	operators that the higher TLS version that they’ve started to
	require is not supported by their old tablet /and/ that they
	cannot upgrade because newer tablets are more power-hungry and
	with only solar and no grid power, they hardly can use them.

	The website operators complied and lowered the TLS version
	requirement.

 > The thing to shoot for (i. e., what a modern “text” browser should
 > target) is *accessibility*.  That’s what standards are geared
 > towards these days, and that’s what sites are *supposed* to support.
 > Often time the weight of law and/or public opinion can be brought to
 > bear against large organizations that do not accommodate disabled
 > people.  Try those sites with something like a screen reader and
 > complain if they still don’t work *that* way.

	Last I’ve checked, Karl Dahlke was trying them regularly with a
	braille display, and /did/ complain that JS APIs evolve faster than
	he can implement them in Edbrowse.  As we put it back in 2021 [2]:

 edb> Nevertheless, support for modern Web technology, and first and
 edb> foremost for the latest advances in Javascript, is largely a
 edb> moving target, and likely requires more effort than the current
 edb> team of developers can provide.

[2] http://am-1.org/~ivan/misc-2021/005.edbrowse.en.xhtml

	Accessibility is an important point, true, but one I find more
	important on a personal level, is that I /can/ patch Lynx (due
	to its relative simplicity), and I very much /cannot/ patch
	Chromium (due to its relative complexity.)

	That’s one of the chief advantages of Lynx to me, and that’s
	why I largely dismiss complaints by website operators that I’m
	using ‘too old’ (or whatever) a browser that’s too inconvenient
	and troublesome for them to add support for.

 > Instead of complaining that you can’t get modern sites to work on
 > some old HTML browser, maybe question whether or not it was wise
 > to have tried jamming everything into HTML in the first place.

	First, why these two options have to be mutually exclusive?
	I’d think that the very existence of this discussion here on
	(non-HTML-based) Usenet is evidence enough that some of us
	can do both.  (For a given value of ‘complain’ in any case.)

	Then again, my Lynx is 2.9.0dev.12 from January 2023.  Is it
	already considered “old”?

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Thread

non-mainstream web (browsers) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-09 14:05 +0000
  Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-09 19:53 +0000
    Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-10 08:15 +0000
      Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-11 00:47 +0000
        Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-15 15:55 +0000
      Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-11 23:00 +0000
        Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2025-08-13 10:21 +1000
          Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-13 19:18 +0000
        [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-14 12:55 +0000
          Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-15 16:42 +0000
            Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-15 21:25 +0000
              Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-17 02:07 +0000
                Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-17 22:47 +0000
                Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-19 21:02 +0000
                Re: [OT] appreciating things old and old-fashioned Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-22 18:39 +0000
                I complain! Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-17 22:55 +0000
        non-mainstream web Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-15 15:05 +0000
          Re: non-mainstream web Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-16 21:42 +0000
            Re: non-mainstream web Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-17 07:12 +0000
            (non-)mainstream web and its costs Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-13 19:00 +0000
            Re: non-mainstream web Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-13 19:17 +0000
        non-mainstream web browsers Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-15 15:55 +0000
          Re: non-mainstream web browsers Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-16 22:46 +0000
            Re: non-mainstream web browsers Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-13 19:13 +0000
              Re: non-mainstream web browsers Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-09-13 23:02 +0000
    Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 08:53 -0700
      Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-11 21:51 +0000
        Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 14:57 -0700
          Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-13 18:43 +0000
            Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-13 12:14 -0700
              Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2025-08-13 12:48 -0700
              Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-15 15:14 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-15 09:03 -0700
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-16 23:36 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-17 07:09 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-18 10:45 -0700
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-18 23:25 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-08-19 08:14 -0700
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-19 21:58 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-20 00:39 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) Doc O'Leary ,   <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> - 2025-08-25 03:24 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) "B. Pym" <Nobody447095@here-nor-there.org> - 2025-08-24 14:42 +0000
                Re: non-mainstream web (browsers) albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl - 2025-08-24 19:41 +0200

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