On 03/05/2022 00:15, Chime Hart wrote:
Since I really have little understanding of user agent strings, is their
anything specific I can type in L Y N X to process this article
User agents have been a mess for a long time, although it looks like the
original standard is beginning to be reinstated.
In the very early days of graphical browsers, sites used to discriminate
against some browsers and as a result Internet Explorer started claiming to
be Netscape and adding its real identity as a comment. It looks like the
latest versions still do that.
As such if you are up against browser discrimination, you just have to
experiment, to work out the rules the site uses. There is a database of them
here: <http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php>, which looks
like it isn't Ajax based.
The other big problem for Lynx, is that many sites, probably most of the
major sites, do not send the common browsers a document, but rather a program
which loads data and formats it into the page. You can sometimes recognize
these on graphical browsers, either because you get a placeholder format,
with grey blocks for notional text, before the actual text appears, or by the
way that individual parts of the page fail independently.
Of the ones I've looked at in some detail, both ancestry.com and Nextdoor
normally operate in this way. The main reason they might create a simple
text version is for search engines, not for end users. If you are very luck
they may also consider text only browsers, but there is probably no
commercial imperative for this, as they can generally meet their legal
obligations by creating pages that work with Jaws and a graphical browser.
A lot more probably do this as well. Maybe most of the well known sites; I
haven't looked at how the typical small business site (the one page sites
with sections that replace each other as you scroll through the page) work,
when it comes to document mode fall back.
From what is going on under the hood on the site you are looking at, they
have absolutely no interest in providing a static document. The site is
behaving like one that is there to attract people to the adverts.