[NFBCS] no display in old browser

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello.  Following up on both Peter and Doug's notes.

For peter:

	One option you have for creating something that will work with lynx is to write a script,
using something like shell, pearl or python, that downloads the daily jSON file from NASA and
reformats it into a web page that you serve.  The Demonstration API key in the message I posted
earlier suggests that you can only do this a few times a day, but I gather NASA changes this
content daily, so loading once in the morning, eastern time, for example, would probably get
you most of what you want.

For Doug:
Regarding creating a text browser which supports Javascript, I actually looked into this for a
while and might be pursuaded to look at it again.  As text browsers go, Lynx is a pretty
capable browser.  What I mean by that is it supports most HTML controls quite well, just not
javascript or the document object model.  In my research, I found adding Javascript itself,
using the Spidermonkey package, was most likely a relatively easy task.  The greater challenge,
and the one that looked more difficult to me, was creating the document object model which the
browser, lynx, and the javascript engine could work on.  Edbrowse, a completely line oriented
text browser, for example, incorporates the Spidermonkey engine, as does the text based
browser links. (l i n k s).  The problem with these two browsers is that neither of them
implement the document object model, which means any javascripts that try to run and which make
assumptions about their environments, don't work.  Next, for Links, (l i n k s) at least, I
found it didn't work as well with basic HTML pages, rendering it unsuitable for even basic text
browsing.

	Finally, I want to come back to my note about lynx being a pretty capable browser.  It has
been my experience that a very complicated web page, even when viewed through a capable browser
such as  Firefox or Chrome using a screen reader, is pretty unusable.  That is to say, it isn't
a very large step to get from a web site that's usable with lynx to a web site that's not
usable with a javascript capable browser and a screen reader.  It is that narrow window between
pure HTML, which works very well with Lynx, and complex javascript pages with a lot of dynamic
content, which don't work very well at all with javascript capable browsers  and screen
readers, which gives me hope that a text based browser, such as Lynx, could be given a new
lease on life if javascript and a basic Document Object Model framework were added to its
capabilities.  The challenge here is that the base of users who would appreciate such features
is probably vanishingly small.

-thanks
-Brian