Browsing Gemini with Lynx at portal.mozz.us
===========================================

A couple of years ago, I posted on the
Lynx mailing list about adding Gemini
support to the browser.[1] That's never
happened. It's too bad, because Lynx
supports a *lot* of protocols: gopher,
http(s), telnet, ftp, nntp, wais,
finger... the list goes on.[2]

I like Lynx a lot and I want it to be
my go-to browser in the terminal for
Gopher, Gemini, and the web. So in the
absence of built-in Gemini support, I
browse Gemini sites through Michael
Lazar's great SmolNet Portal at
portal.mozz.us.

Until yesterday, Lynx suffered from a
minor compatibility problem with the
portal. While the portal rendered
gemtext line breaks properly in other
browsers, the line breaks were not
recognized by Lynx, which displayed a
wall of unbroken text.

So I opened an issue on Michael
Lazar's Github page for
gemini-portal[3] and he fixed the
problem by the end of the day,
switching from css-based line-breaking
to inserting the html <br> tag into
gemini documents. He also explained
how to change a setting in Lynx to
make it render the <br> tag better. In
the lynx.cfg file (at
/etc/lynx/lynx.cfg in Debian 12),
uncomment COLLAPSE_BR_TAGS:TRUE and
then change it to
COLLAPSE_BR_TAGS:FALSE

I thought I'd spread the information
and add a thank you to Michael Lazar.
I've now raised two issues on Github
that he's addressed and the other one
was a lot more work: he upgraded
pygopherd to Python 3.

---------------

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lynx-dev/2020-09/msg00007.html
[2] https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support.html
[3] https://github.com/michael-lazar/gemini-portal/issues/4

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