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[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

An answer from the author of backtalk, used at our bbs and elsewhere,
which works with Lynx and Opera 6 (not 5) but not with Links.  Does links
2.1.9 do cookies?  What is HTTP authentication?  

Anyway, this mail explains why Links is not working at a lot of sites with
forms, but Lynx is.  Nice to have the choice.  Is there documentation for
links 2.1.9?

Comments welcome and I can share them with Jan if you want.  

> I got Lynx and opera 6 (not 5) to work with backtalk but
> Links (latest version 2.1.9 graphical or 0.98 text-only) says 
> Authorization Required instead of asking for my login and password.

Yup.  I looked at the web page for Links and it apparantly does not have
HTTP Authentication Support.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with forms.
It certainly won't log in to Backtalk, nor to umpteen billion other web
sites that use HTTP Authentication.  HTTP Authentication isn't very hard to
implement, and is very widely used.  I have a hard time taking a browser that
doesn't support it very seriously.

It is possible to configure Backtalk so that it doesn't use HTTP
Authentication.  The backtalk demo site at
   http://www.unixpapa.com/cgi-bin/bt_demo/backtalk
is configured this way.  However, doing this requires heavier use of forms
and cookies, however I see hints that links is also bad at both cookies and
forms, so I doubt if this will work much better.

> Links fails at a lot of sites with forms, but it is the only
> non-X graphical browser available for Linux, and works nicely on
> 486s with 16M RAM.

Um, lynx works fine with Linux.  I use it regularly.

> Maybe you can add something to backtalk so it works with Links.

No, probably not.  No HTTP auth, no cookies or broken cookies, flaky forms.
I'm not convinced that it would be possible to construct a secure
authentication system that would work around that much brain damage.  If
it is possible it would be hard, likely harder than fixing the browser.

Backtalk makes fairly minimal demands on the browser.  I think it would work
on the better browsers available in 1993 (NCSA Mosaic, mostly) when the
world wide web was in its infancy.  HTTP authentication was part of the
original design of the HTTP protocol and has been a standard for as long
as the web has existed.  Links falls substantially short of this minimum.
Support for so sad a piece of junk is just too low on my priority list to
ever happen.

Note however "elinks" at http://elinks.or.cz/.  This claims that it does do
HTTP Authentication.  Also "hacked linkes" at
http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/.  It is not obvious if the
"links 2" site at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/
does anything better about authentication.  My guess that elinks is the
branch that best fits your needs.  Development efforts seem to be 
substantially
fragmented, but at least various people are trying to correct the deficiencies
in this thing, which is clearly the right solution to the problem.

                    - Jan