Lynx and other animals
Why text browsers are still important.
Pamela Anderson was 15 years younger the first time I saw a picture in a graphical web browser. That was an early version of Netscape Navigator on an X-Windows terminal when it took nearly half an hour to download one single image from the World Wide Web.
Before that time there was a long period when the text-only browsers were popular as they were more or less the only option to access any information on the internet.
One of the commonly used text-only browsers, called Lynx initially, was developed by a team of students at University of Kansas.
The two ways of browsing in Lynx were either highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or entering the number of a previously numbered link. Before advanced screen readers appeared Lynx was commonly used by visually impaired people because of its text-to-speech friendly nature.
Text only browsers can still be effective when low bandwidth internet connections or older computers are being used, to get the pure information without images, distracting pop-ups, and advertisements.
Above JSA Digital website rendered by Lynx
Furthermore, text only browsers have a much more important role that needs to be considered by any web-site builders. Namely, what is shown by a text only browser is nearly the same as what the web indexing search engine robots, crawlers, can see. So you can easily loose valuable information being indexed by search engines if your website does not present key information in a text-only browser. Obviously, this could result in a lower page-ranking, loosing potential visitors and customers.
To avoid this shortfall there are common techniques which can make sure that your website presents a similar experience to robots as to real people.
It is important that all images and buttons on your pages have the “alt” attribute which describes in text what is in the element. All links should have “title” values which add information about the nature of the links, especially in the cases of a linked images. This is as easy to forget as it is easy to check. The common browsers render this as a tooltip, so when you hover your mouse over the element, you can see that text.
There is another area where it is important to have additional text based information. Most of the multimedia elements of a website are not visible by default search engines. It is important to have an alternative text version of content for browsers (and search engines) without support for Flash, Javascript, embedded video or any components other than html.
With a text-only browser you can also test the structure of your site from a search engine optimisation prospective. If you see the actual content at the top with the navigation and other information after, its highly likely that the real and most relevant content will be indexed. This is because most of the crawlers only use the first 200 words from the <body> section of the page. If your navigation lists many items, the search engine may not encounter your main content within the first 200 words.
One way to check your website is through the online version of a text browser by the World Wide Web Consortium, alternatively you can install Lynx from here to your own machine and have an historic surf experience.
Where are the other animals? Last month Microsoft Research released a paper about a Web browser calls Gazelle that’s constructed in such a way as to act like an operating system exclusively protecting resources and giving better security.
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