“w3m, an acronym that stands for See the WWW in English, is the
creation of Akinori Ito, who originally created w3m from a
UNIX-based pager application known as fm. Ito originally used w3m
as an e-mail reader and a general-purpose file reader. He was also
using it as a Web browser, but many pages did not render properly
because they were using tables to create page layout–something w3m
could not handle.”
“After one unsuccessful attempt to create a page renderer, Ito
tried again in 1998, when he was a visiting researcher at Boston
University.”
“Ito’s efforts were successful, and w3m became a more functional
Web browser.”
“I tried w3m out myself on a Linux box, and was interested to
see how it laid out complicated pages. Most pages I visited seemed
similar enough in layout to the graphic versions for me to follow
what was going on. Navigation is handled with the keyboard only,
and full instructions are found in w3m’s manual or in the runtime
help screen you can get by pressing H.”