[BRLTTY] OT: lynx and cookies

[Stéphane Doyon]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:

> Hi Mario, thanks for your reply,
>
>> I see the same thing here for amazon.de with botz, lynx and lynx-cur.
>
> Okay.
>
>> My suspicion is that they changed something on their site
>> which now makes lynx unusable :-(.

Just a me too. On amazon.ca. And on Fedora.
I was logged in at some point in November-December, so login must have
worked before, and when I wanted to actually place an order for Christmas,
never could login.

> Perhaps, but I wonder whether there isn't a problem on lynx-s side,
> however.

Quite possibly. I don't remember specific circumstances off the top of my 
head, but I've had cases where I could do things with elinks that lynx 
couldn't. Oh I think last time that happened was logging in to a Google 
account for Summer of Code...

> Indeed, after submitting a search query to Google, lynx asks whether it
> should accept cookies with an invalid prefix.

I had a brief look at a lynx trace, it seems to think that the cookie
needs to be a prefix of / rather than /search... (The cookie is
path=/search and the URL is http://www.google.com/search?....) So lynx
might well be wrong here actually, or perhaps having a overly strict
interpretation of some standard...

> There are options to ask
> lynx to accept all cookies even those with an invalid prefix, but this
> option seems to be not saved properly on disk.

On Ubuntu I have
ACCEPT_ALL_COOKIES:TRUE
FORCE_COOKIE_PROMPT:yes
in my /etc/lynx-cur/local.cfg, and that makes it accept the prompt 
automatically. It still likes to pause and show it to you, along with lots 
of other useless status messages, makes it a lot slower than it could be.

Other useful options I have in there are:
TEXTFIELDS_NEED_ACTIVATION:TRUE
PERSISTENT_COOKIES:TRUE
COOKIE_FILE:~/.lynx_cookies
REFERER_WITH_QUERY:PARTIAL

My lynx-curr also has a bug with SSL not finding root certificates, some 
bug with gnutls. That's on Ubuntu Gutsy at least, presumably in some 
Debians, possibly fixed since.

I really really much prefer lynx's layout of a page and I don't like 
elinks's menus much, but lynx has been having annoying issues for me 
lately.

-- 
Stéphane Doyon
<s.doyon at videotron.ca>
http://pages.videotron.com/sdoyon/