Old School Browsing with w3m

“Generally, I focus on the cutting edge goodies for the Web, but
this week I spent some time with w3m after a long hiatus and
thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at the old
school Web. I needed to convert a page of HTML to text on the fly,
and one of the best tools I’ve found for that is w3m. It’s also a
pretty good, if extremely basic, Web browser if all you need to do
is read pages on the Web.

“Why muck with a text-mode browser? Certainly not because it’s
full-featured. Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror, or Opera, any other
modern browser will get you more bang for the buck than w3m —
though w3m’s rendering speed is pretty impressive. But w3m has a
few features that you won’t find in other browsers that make it
worth having around.

“Checking Site Design

“Your site may look picture-perfect in your favorite browser,
but what about all the other browsers that you haven’t had time to
test? Does it degrade nicely for people on less functional mobile
browsers? While the percentage of visitors who hit your site with
less-functional browsers may be small, it’s still important to make
sure that the site is usable.”

Complete
Story