comex wrote: >I couldn't imagine using a text-mode browser as my standard one. >What's the point...?
They're much more user-friendly than graphical browsers. I've never found a graphical browser that I was comfortable about using. Fundamentally, graphical browsers are evil and rude because they do what the website tells them to do, rather than what I want them to do. They have lots of magic behaviour that makes them unpredictable. They don't play nicely. And they all use the kind of GUI exemplified by Windows, which I've always found painful to operate. Then there's the documentation. This is an issue that particularly, but not exclusively, arises with graphical programs, which often try to do their own sui generis interactive help system instead of a plain old man page. I've found that in such browsers (e.g., Firefox) the help system is no help whatsoever, because it merely parrots what is already apparent from the interface, rather than explaining deep concepts or giving useful advice. I suspect that this is no coincidence: I suspect that the program's authors are themselves confused, have failed to instill the program with any deep concepts, and are not sufficiently serious engineers to see the value in documentation. I generally avoid using such poor programs, and so am not often subjected to the correspondingly poor documentation. I don't have much call for graphical stuff anyway. Right now, a fairly typical state, my work environment consists of an X server on a 2560x1024 display (two monitors side by side), twm, and eighteen xterms. No other X clients running. Many times a day I'll want to view an image from a website, in which case lynx happily fires off xloadimage; I like that this happens only for the images that I actually want to look at, rather than for tens of useless images per web page. When I really need to do Javascript, which is almost exclusively for viewing the company's website (which I'm indirectly implementing), I'll start Firefox. So, generally, almost everything I do is text based, and I prefer to view text in a specialist tool (xterm) than in something that's mainly concerned with a GUI. People these days forget what the "T" in "HTML" stands for. -zefram
