Lynx (web browser)

Lynx is a text-based web browser that was developed under Unix, but is now available for almost all operating systems. He is, among others, for use in text-only terminals without a mouse.

The browser was developed around 1992 at the University of Kansas, is still widespread today making it one of the browsers with the longest history of development. Before the program was adapted to the World Wide Web and its Protocol http, Lynx was a client for a proprietary hypertext protocol. Thus elements of Gopher were used. Lynx was released in 1995 under the free software GPL License.

Appear in current versions instead of graphics which alternative texts in the "alt " attribute of the "img " element (if present) or their filename. Optional graphics may be displayed as links and viewed through an external program. Frames appear as a series of selectable links individually, along with the text of the " noframes " element. Lynx also supports cookies, client-side graphics referencing sensitive ( imagemap ) and mouse operation, however, only limited tables and JavaScript at all.

Text browsers are compared to their graphics-based competitors very quickly and are considered " crash-proof ". They are often used for research because they reduce websites on the text.

Also popular is the ability to use Lynx as an HTML interpreter in shell scripts to automate specific search sites. Lynx is also used as a component of web crawlers. For example, can be recorded, which can then be subsequently adjusted and played again with Lynx scripts.

Lynx is well suited to check web pages for their readability by screen readers or Braille display, such as blind people use it.