From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-05T23:02:21+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] flatulent-0.0.1 ascii captcha for the masses

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 07:31:43AM +0900, ara.t.howard wrote:
>> On Jul 4, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Brian Candler wrote:
>>> Hmm - this risks making the captcha visible by fewer and fewer  
>>> browsers. OK,
>>> so lynx wouldn't be able to view a PNG captcha either; but you risk  
>>> locking
>>> out a lot of mobile devices, set-top boxes and other embedded web  
>>> browsers
>>> (which could otherwise display a PNG quite happily)
>>>
>>> However, perhaps ASCII-art generation (as a form of unusual and  
>>> disjointed
>>> character set) combined with server-side rendering to a PNG would  
>>> get around
>>> that issue, save you a lot of work in obfuscating the HTML itself,  
>>> and also
>>> be harder to parse.
>> true.  i'm not too worried about that though.
> 
> I'd be worried about the JavaScript and CSS requirements.  In fact, I
> won't use a system for validating humanity that doesn't work in Lynx,
> unless some other necessary functionality of the website absolutely
> cannot work in Lynx (such as Flash animations).  Even then, I'd probably
> avoid something that won't work in Lynx, since (for example) a Lynx user
> could navigate to YouTube and do a search to find a particular video,
> then use youtube-dl to download it to the computer and play it using
> MPlayer.  No in-browser support for Flash video needed.  YouTube can be a
> useful website for a Lynx user -- so mine should be, too, since I don't
> even provide Flash videos as the main content of any of my websites.
> 

I was once a proud member of the "This Web Site Best Viewed With Lynx"
club. Ah, the good old days, when a dollar was worth a dime, Netscape
was more popular than Internet Explorer and nobody's cat had a web page.
;). I learned HTML by editing that web page by hand and generating code
with Perl 4 on an HP100 Pocket PC.

Well, maybe *somebody's* cat had a web page ...