NOTE:
lynx
).
Lynx can be used in a text-only window. It does not display pictures. Hence
it is faster, but a bit cumbersome when dealing with frames and tables. One
can arrange that the Netscape bookmarks be available in Lynx (and the other
way around).
The "Preferences" of Netscape are under the "Edit"
menu.
A few things that you might want to change on Netscape are:
mail
and pine
. Emacs can also be used to send
and read mail.
/tmp
(or other "temporary") directory of the machine
on which Netscape runs.
The system-wide file extensions to MIME type mapping are in the file
/etc/mime.types
.
You can check /etc/mailcap
for the system-wide file.
(Information correct as of May 2003, and not available on all machines.)
Roughly speaking, it works as follows: when the browser receives a file (e.g., a HTML code, or an image, maybe an audio file), the "sender" (i.e., the server) will first sent a message describing the content of the file. The "receiver" (i.e., the client), will look for the appropriate "software" (i.e., application) to handle that type of file.
Often this type of information is inferred from the suffix in the name
of the file (e.g., a file called house.jpg
is expected to be
an image in JPEG format, whose MIME type is image/jpeg
and is
handled by Netscape). You can see the MIME-types that Netscape is aware of
by looking at "Applications" under the "Navigator"
choice in the "Preferences" list.
Notice that there are many types that come with "Unknown: Prompt User". When Netscape receives such a file, it will ask you what to do with it (open it with a software of your choice, save it on the disk, etc.).
When the browser wants to save a file on the disk, it will ask your confirmation. Most likely you are also being told the MIME-type at the incoming file, which is often enough to adjust the browser as described below.
If you want to "instruct" the browser how to handle a MIME
type, you can either edit its "Applications" list, or add this
information to the file ~/.mailcap
in your home directory
(note: either approach will modify this file). This file is the standard
place in Unix/Linux for this kind of information, and many programs will
read it.
Example: a common format for math papers is DVI (produced from TeX). The relevant MIME information about it is:
On Unix or Linux the DVI files are handled by
- MIME type: application/x-dvi
- Suffixes: dvi
xdvi
. Thus, you should put this in the "Application:" field of the "Handled by" area (be sure to check all the relevant boxes). To be precise, you should putxdvi %s
, where%s
, the argument passed on toxdvi
, will be the replaced by the name of the file (the browser takes care of this; normally it will save the file in/tmp
, with a very long and meaningless name).
You can try this on the Article math.NT/0009046 from arXiv (this is an e-print arXiv of physics, mathematics, and computer science, maintained at Los Alamos). You have the choice of dowloading the paper in various formats, including DVI.