Re: lynx-dev Lynx 2.7.1 and 2.8 refuse to render certain HTML documents

[David Woolley]

> 
> When I attempt to read
> http://lummi.stanford.edu/class/ps142k/WWW/casebook/casebook.htm (a site
> which I found whilst searching for materials relevant to international
> law), Lynx versions 2.7.1 and 2.8 both display the document as HTML source
> instead of formatting it. I could not find any error near the beginning of
> the file, judging from the HTML source as displayed by Lynx, except for

What was the Content-Type from the header.  (I'm offline and get charged
for phone time, so I'm not going to do this myself.)

My guess is that this page was verified with MSIE, which is (I think
deliberately) broken and ignores the content type to a large extent.
I think what MS has done is to decide that, if the content looks like
HTML but is not declared as such, the server is probably misconfigured.
Unfortunately this means that you can't create a plain text page containing
sample HTML!

The use of the .htm broken form of .html tends to reinforce this.  Early
server configurations only handled the correct form, and MS users were
expected to rename, which is not normally a problem if their links say .html,
but nowadays most server administrators give in and add .htm to their
MIME types list.

If this is the case, after complaining to the site/author, you can read
individual documents by using the force html option of Lynx, or download
the pages and view them locally, where the lack of content type cues means
that Lynx must guess from the filename extension.

> the absence of an SGML Document Type Declaration. However, many authors
> fail to include such declarations in their web pages, and Lynx reads them
> without difficulty. Thus, the problem must lie elsewhere. Is this
> phenomenon the result of a bug in Lynx?

I don't remember any reports of problems with badly formatted Content-Type
headers in recent versions, and Content-Type is the exclusive means of
finding the document type.  When you fetch the header (] for the standard
keymap, do check for strange formatting of this line, though.
> 
>