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                     The history and evolution of the Links browsers

   There is quite a lot of Links flavors around. Why isn't there just one Links? The
   reasons for this are many. One of the most important is the different approaches
   taken by the various teams towards development, such as coding style. Another is
   disagreement about what should be included in a browser.

The different flavors

[11]Links-0.9x (Text mode)

   The original Links was written by Mikulas Patocka. Links 0.9x is still maintained
   by Mikulas, but from 0.98 on, no new features are accepted, only bug-fixes and
   translation updates.

ELinks (Text mode)

   The ELinks branching point was 0.96. The development of the original Links had
   stopped for a few months at that version and Petr Baudis (pasky) started to
   maintain a patch-set on top of the original Links, known between historians as
   the [12]-pb patches. These are ELinks' ancestors. You will find some of ELinks'
   oldest features and bug-fixes there in separate patches.

   Eventually this led to the first fork of Links. The etymology of the name ELinks
   was originally Experimental Links (because of various plans and ideas) and now it
   is something between Extended and Enhanced ;-).

   One of the ELinks goals is of course to provide the best and most usable
   text-mode web browser. However, another goal is to provide a very fast but clean,
   structured, and complete web rendering engine (that's ELusive). And yet another
   goal is to provide a tiny, fast but powerful graphics browser, where the relation
   Links -> ELinks could evolve into Links2 -> ELinks. These goals should be
   accomplished using a more open development form than the original Links had.

   All fixes from Links 0.9x which are still relevant for ELinks (code that is still
   present in some form and for which the functionality hasn't been superseded) are
   merged. Given the status of 0.9x, this means 90% of the patches are ported.

[13]Links-Lua (Text mode)

   Links-Lua was a fork of the Links web browser with the goal of adding Lua
   scripting capabilities in order to make Links more flexible and customisable. It
   was written by Peter Wang and Cliff Cunnington and later merged with ELinks.

[14]Links-2.x (Text and graphics modes)

   Derived from Links-0.92, Links version 2 provides, in addition to the original
   text mode browser, a fast graphics browser that runs on X11, the Linux console
   framebuffer, and other environments. It also includes some JavaScript support and
   some changes ported from later 0.9x releases (but not all; e.g. you won't find
   key-binding support in 2.x).

   It is mainly developed and maintained by Mikulas Patocka, Petr Kulhavy, Karel
   Kulhavy and Martin Pergel as a project under [15]Twibright Labs. The development
   approach is somewhat more reserved, due to lack of time and more care taken
   towards keeping the released code bug-free and the features to a minimum.
   Discussion list is [16]links-list.

[17]Hacked Links Project AKA Links-hacked (Text and graphics modes)

   A patched version of Links2 from Sergey Karpov. Hacked Links seems to be
   providing the experimental merge point of the Links browsers using stuff from
   both Links2 and ELinks mixed with some of Sergey Karpov's own innovations. (Not
   bad for a guy who still calls himself an astro-physicist. ;)

   There is general agreement on moving Hacked Links towards ELinks feature-wise but
   it is unknown when or if this will ever happen.

Additional info

   You might also find interesting info on the meta [18]Links site maintained by
   Cliff Cunnington.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   Last Modified: 10-Nov-2008 00:39:11 EEST. Validate: [22]CSS [23]XHTML.

References

   1. http://elinks.or.cz/news.rss
   2. http://elinks.or.cz/index.html
   3. http://elinks.or.cz/about.html
   4. http://elinks.or.cz/community.html
   5. http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/index.html
   6. http://elinks.or.cz/download.html
   7. http://elinks.or.cz/faq.html
   8. http://elinks.or.cz/feedback.html
   9. http://elinks.or.cz/news.html
  10. http://elinks.or.cz/search.html
  11. http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
  12. http://pasky.or.cz/~pasky/dev/links/
  13. http://links.sf.net/links-lua/
  14. http://links.twibright.com/
  15. http://www.twibright.com/
  16. http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/links-list/
  17. http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/
  18. http://links.sf.net/
  19. http://elinks.or.cz/feedback.html#web
  20. http://elinks.cz/
  21. http://elinks.or.cz/COPYING
  22. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer
  23. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer