Re: Reviving the terminal internet -- looking for collaborators

Hi Ian,
It is interesting you would mention Cloudflair.
I have a site, that I visit many times  a week, often daily, that uses 
cloudflair extensively.
Yet,i can reach it, exclusively, using Lynx.
That is because, since many of the sites members are from all over the 
world, often from places where north American ideas of the Internet are 
technically impossible, the site owners learned how to use Cloudflair, as 
a 
tool.   Not running it on auto pilot.
Again, some of this is a matter of pr.
Sure that Wired magazine article is ten years  old now.  Welcoming a revisit 
of the topic speaking personally.
Certainly JavaScript is pervasive, but there are some links that I can 
submit in lynx even when scripted, because they are designed to work from 
the Keyboard.
I believe it was another list member here  who noted that JavaScript 
is just a language..which can be used better if people learn to actually 
employ it in a way that allows communication.
Progressive Enhancement web design lets  site shave their JavaScript on 
top, while still allowing mid and low graphics access.
I dare say part of the problem is that site designers, many of them at 
least, are not actually designing their sites.
they are picking up add water and stir tools that create such challenges.

Kare



On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, Ian Collier via Lynx-dev wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 03, 2026 at 12:07:19AM -0400, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>> First, I suggest reading an article from wired magazine entitled.
>> "I turned off Javascript for a week, and it was glorious."
>> Illustrates there would be quite a market for  simple text focused
>> Internet..but there may be a few factors to focus on first.
>
> That article[1] was written in 2015, and unfortunately things are
> different now.
>
> In fact I do do most of my main browsing with JavaScript turned off.
> (I say turned off, but it has to be selectively enabled for work's RT
> instance because that has become basically unusable without it, and
> for work's authentication system because that is based on Microsoft
> Entra and is heavily JavaScript-based - it certainly can't be used
> in Lynx).
>
> Anyway, as a result I am now mostly prohibited from using Google
> search in my graphical non-JavaScript browser.  Lynx is actually
> useful on this front, because although Google denies service if your
> user-agent mentions Lynx, for now it still works if you lowercase
> the 'L' in Lynx.
>
> But worse, because of stupid AI scrapers pummelling web servers to near
> death, a fair percentage of the web is now behind either CloudFlare or
> Anubis, both of which deny you access if you don't have both JavaScript
> and cookies.  Some of the rest are of the kind that deny service based
> on the browser's user-agent string, and Lynx is a common victim of that
> discrimination.
>
> Ian.
>
> [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/
>
>