> Text-based browsers and modern HTML, no success story in sight. Given the progress we see in web technologies, the gap will only widen, so much so that w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.

This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.

People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.

Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.

    claimed schemes:            ftp:, gemini:, gopher:, http:, https:, iterm2:, mailto:, news:, nntp:, ssh:, telnet:, titan:, wais:, whois:, x-man-page:

One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful:

  - Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
  - Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs;
  - Reading articles (e.g. Wikipedia) feels closer to reading a book;
  - It even supports JavaScript to a degree!
  - The affordances of line-oriented editing carry over nicely.

In particular, when using line-oriented interfaces, it's quite natural to build up a small collection of context-dependent snippets from documentation, source code, sample code, whatever. Putting a small collage of these on the screen is effortless and an experience I do miss with other UI paradigms.

The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!

[0]:https://github.com/edbrowse/edbrowse

The top comment in the article mentions it, but chawan[1] is really quite neat. Many sites are still have their quirks (or may be broken), but I think it's the closest I've seen a text browser approximate a "real" browser. The support for CSS, JS, and images (depends on your terminal) is already quite impressive even if imperfect. To my knowledge it's an actual browser implementation rather than "cheating" by using an existing browser like browsh (which is still quite cool).

[1] https://chawan.net/

How does Cloudflare handle text-based browsers? Do they immediately flag them as bots?

Sadly and disgustingly, I fired up lynx last night and found out that Google will not allow you to search with it anymore. I guess this change happened a few months ago and there was an HN thread about it[0], but I hadn't noticed until now.

Going to altavista still works great (even though it just redirects you to yahoo ;)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201692