[WEB4LIB] Character set in lynx

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Francesco Giacanelli wrote:

> I am using lynx text browser to test accessibility of the sites. This
> browser cannot display correctly certain characters (such e', paragraph
> sign, etc.). I think I should change character set option, but what is the
> value to fill in (actually the value is ISO-8859-1)?

Well it turns out Lynx has more capabilities in this area than I expected! The
following applies to Lynx 2.8.1pre.9 and, presumably later; I did not
investigate at what point before this features were added.

Lynx can understand incoming HTML's language and charset properties. It looks
like it can be told what language and charset to assume for those web pages
that do not indicate such (bad, bad, webmasters!). 

The challenge comes in displaying various characters and sets in a
character-based environment. Obviously, you are limited by the capabilities of
the terminal or terminal emulator. You CAN, however, tell Lynx in what
character set to display its data, and match that to your terminal/emulator's
capabilities. In Lynx, do "o" for options, then "c" for "display (C)haracter
set". Then you can choose from a list (mine showed 40 options). The most
all-encompassing would appear to be Unicode UTF-8. There does not appear to be
a way to have Lynx switch display character sets based on language; this would
require an agreed-on protocol for command the terminal/emulator to change
charset.

Because Anzio (our Windows telnet client) can accept incoming data in UTF-8, I
tried an experiment. I set both Anzio and Lynx for UTF-8. I then went looking
for a good test webpage, and found
   http://www.trigeminal.com/samples/provincial.html
When I pointed Lynx to it, I got a fairly good demonstration. Limitations
included a) what characters were in the font I was using, b) some elements of
Cascading Style Sheets. If you'd like to try this, demos of Anzio (either
Anzio Lite or AnzioWin) are available as below.

-- 
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com 
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com