Functional Description of the Lynx Browser

Lynx is a text-based Web browser available for Unix computers. It was developed at the University of Kansas as an easy way for people to access the Web without needing a sophisticated computer or Web browser.

The target audience for Lynx seems to include at least three groups:

1. People or situations where graphical browsers like Netscape won't work (for example, old computers);
2. For use as a general front-end to files, directories, and other host-based services. In other words, as an alternative to the Unix command line; and
3. For people with disabilities or otherwise can't make good use of the graphical browsers.

This review is directed at the third group, especially people with limited vision. Even though the Web is usually thought of as a visual medium, there is nothing especially visually-oriented about most of the content. So, it's reasonable that someone with limited or no eyesight might like to access the Web.

With Netscape, this could be a real challenge. Visually impaired people often use computers with voice-to-speech synthesizers, so that the text of the screen can be read aloud on a speaker. (Some other people might have the output generated in braille.) The problem is that the screen layout, especially with frames and tables, is not clear enough for a speech synthesizer program to follow.

Lynx offers an alternative to this. According to the manual page, you can optionally turn on a cursor so that it's easier to know where the next URL/link is without being able to see it. With Lynx, all you need to do is use regular "more" commands or the arrow keys to get around. This is easier than Netscape, where you're always selecting a different region of the screen with the mouse, using scroll bars, etc.

The man page for Lynx seems to say that you can use it to look at your own files and directories. I tried this, and it worked! lynx . would actually bring up my own directory! It looks like you could also run programs from within Lynx, but I wasn't sure how to do this.

Finally, I saw that Lynx isn't too good with tables, and can't handle frames at all. This means that it only offers a limited view of the SILS Web page (which uses frames) and displays all the tables for INSL80 one paragraph at a time, instead of as a table.

Lynx offers a good alternative to graphical browsers. It's faster to start, and has lots of other options not mentioned here that could be useful. For example, the -dump option lets you copy the source code from a URL to your local directory.

The one thing this reminds me of is that it's important when authoring Web pages to make sure they'll work with Lynx, as well as the various versions of Netscape and MS Internet Explorer.