On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:08:37AM EDT, Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> cga2000 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Sun, Jun 04, 2006:
> > On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 12:42:14PM EDT, Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> > > cga2000 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Sat, Jun 03, 2006:
> >
> > I'm somewhat sceptical about rgb distance calculators, though. There
> > must be times when - with three dimensions.. there are two different
> > choices.. or more.. and with human perception being what it is I am not
> > convinced that even when there is just one mathematically correct choice
> > it would be the natural choice that your average human would pick..
> 
> Well, zas and me discussed creating a more complex system for
> configuring the "color model" (see doc/color-model.txt) but it never got
> further than the above document and frankly I am not sure if it is worth
> it. I think the color picker does an OK job, but maybe my color
> blindness is just playing tricks with me.
> 
In the context of elinks, probably not. I have a feeling this has more
its place at a lower level - the desktop, maybe?

I'm not really convinced 256 colors was such a good idea to begin with.
Naturally, it's orders of magnitude better than the 8/8 or even 8/16 on
regular terms.. But why not go the whole hog and have a terminal that
supports what the video card is capable of? 16-bit - 64k colors would
probably have been a sensible choice and made life easier for everybody?

Only one extra byte per cell.. 

> > I can't spend as much time tinkering with elinks now as I would have
> > liked so I'll probably live with it.
> 
> Ok, but if you feel like modding up your ELinks you should really try
> the Spidermonkey Javascript scripting backend created by Miciah.  It's
> fairly easy to get working on a debian system 

Really? I was never able to get xterm, gnu/scren, and elinks.. to build
from source - the debian way, I mean.. I was in a rush and it seemed I
had to become a debian packaging expert before I could hope to get that
to work.. So now I have a bunch of stuff that's all /.configure'd and
compiled from source. Annoying.

This said, I'm very curious of the Javascript capabilities and I would
really like to see the difference it makes. I do run into pages where I
am stuck and I have to fire up mozilla and I suspect that not having
Javascript enabled is part of my problem. 

> and it is currently one of
> the most developed scripting backends for ELinks. Examples are in
> contrib/smjs/.
> 
> > But why does the absence of the
> > bgcolor attribute have different effects in elinks and graphical
> > browsers such as mozilla?
> 
> Because the default background color in mozilla is white, where as you
> said you have configured your default background color to be black or
> something.
> 
> > > Yes, the many config options is one of ELinks' biggest asset (and
> > > weakness ;-).
> >
> > I really don't see it as a weakness at all. It's just that elinks - a
> > bit like mutt - is really meant for people who know what they are doing.
> > If like myself you know next to nothing about web stuff you should have
> > the intelligence to accept it and live with some minor annoyances until
> > you have the time to investigate further.
> 
> Having a sane default configuration is very important. The many options
> is a weakness if you end up scaring new users away. If they feel they
> have to know of all the little details.
> 
That's pretty much what I meant. But as a new user I only noticed all
the options when I took a look at the elinks.conf file. But then I was
in so much of a rush that I did  not really look at the o - "Option
Manager" until recently.. 

Actually what I missed - again as a new user - was more samples of
elinks "in action".. I did find a few screenshots but I would have liked
to see more. Now, the reason I say this is that for a new user and for
something such as elinks that has the potential to display such a wide
variety of documents.. I was never sure I was configured correctly and
seeing what you or the other seasoned users of elinks are seeing. This
nagging feeling that I may not be making the most of the product.

For instance, until you told me this thing about setting my foreground
and background to "black" I was seeing lots of pages revert to my
xterm's black background. Now practically everything is rendered with a
white/light background.. I don't know if this makes sense.. But my point
is that being the only elinks user in my neighborhood .. as far as I
know .. it was not likely one of the seasoned users I mentioned would
have stopped by.. and said.. wait a minute.. this isn't right..  looked
at my setup and fixed a couple of things. And conversely I could not
walk up to someone's desk looked over his shoulder for a couple minutes
and said.. wait a minute.. his elinks looks a lot better than mine..
iow, I was totally in the dark as to how an optimal setup of elinks
should behave in real-life situations. May still be, for that matter.. 

I don't know if it's realistic/possible but it might be a good idea to
have elinks "test pages" .. you go to the test page and if you're set up
right you should see this.. and a link to a screenshot. 

Confessions of the isolated noob.. not sure that's very useful.

:-)

> > As far as user satisfaction
> > goes I would have given mozilla six out of ten.. At this point in time,
> > I would give elinks 7.5.. and apart from changing a few keyboard actions
> > I haven't really done anything to customize it.  But it's nice to know
> > that just about anything I may need to customize *is* customizable. 
> 
> Now you are just being nice. ;)

No, I'm dead serious:

1. I'm on a bb connection that performs quite well for stuff like iso
images downloads etc. Most pages in mozilla take some five to twenty
seconds to render.. Twenty seconds..! I mean that's pretty much a worse
case scenario but it adds up to ten minutes' wait doing nothing to
access a mere thirty web pages.. If like me you google a lot for tech
info and try a number of links before you find something that looks half
useful that's clearly unacceptable.

2. Now that I have aligned my basic navigation keyboard actions to vim's
- j,k to scroll .. h,l to go back and forward.. and J,K to jump to the
next/previous link I'm having the most comfortable surfing experience
ever.. And once I had figured how to use the "Keybinding Manager" it
only took a couple of intuitive minutes to set my bindings
*interactively*.. Try to do that in mozilla. 

3. Because elinks is a text-mode browser I don't have to put up with all
the distractions.. click here and there to block all this commercial
shockflash stuff .. with mozilla it usually takes a minute or more
before I have enough peace and quiet and then I am able to (re)focus and
actually start reading. With elinks, I can choose to display a picture
when I want/need it. Freedom, you know..

Come to think of it.. I got my math wrong.. if each of the above is
worth only one extra point I should have rated mozilla 4.5 and elinks
7.5/10.. 

:-)

Thanks,

cga
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