Terminal web browsing

Who would have thought that browsing the web froma terminal would be any good? I certanly would not have beeived it. Not until I was forced to do so myself.

I have a little project going on–more on that later–and that is forcing me to use the terminal. Only the terminal. So without my usual graphical user interface I was forced to improvise and learned how to use Lynx. As it turns out, text-only based web browsing is actually super!

I have even been writing messages on social web sites, replying to emails in Runbox's web email interface, and reading the news from NRK Nyheter.

Lynx is great. It goes so much faster without having to load JavaScripts, CSS, images, and other extra media. It is just the plain-text HTML or XML-parsed XHTML that is loaded. The result is a very fast and easy to navigate interface.

In my experience it has actually been easier to navigate most web sites using the Lynx-variant interface instead of the web sites own designs. As long as the page is done properly, it works like a charm.

I would recommend anyone to try text-only web browsing for a few hours. It is a whole new experience. Especially web arcitects and -designers should hive it a go. Get some new impulses, ideas, and grasp how good the web actually can be!

The only thing that has bee very disapointing is gay porn in ANSCII.

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2 comments

This blog post was written from Lynx during an installation of Gentoo GNU/Linux. No spell checker were available at the time.

Comment by Daniel Aleksandersen at 2008-07-05 @954.

I found your bug report on Lynx. I think it is a shame that Debian does not allow users to use persistent cookies. It just seams to me as a very dumb limitation.

Comment by Thomas Lionel at 2008-08-02 @848.

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