Help Support HL2.5

<a href = "http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/"><img src =
"http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/hlfriend.gif" width = "100"
border = "0" height = "50" alt = "[HyperLink-friendly]"></a>

So, how do you make your site HyperLink-friendly? It's easy: HL2.5 tries very hard to be as Lynx-similar as possible. If your site is text-browser friendly, you're 95% there already.

You can autodetect HL2.5 by looking for its user-agent string:
Lynx (compatible; HyperLink-Parsing-Proxy C64/128)

Just keep these limitations of 2.5 in mind if you're thinking of retrofitting for it (which will also help Lynx users!):

• Since HL2.5 is a web interface to HL2.0, it inherits the same limitations on links (i.e. the entire line becomes a hyperlink). If you have a lot of links, they will tend to get spread out. So, it helps to compress or hide link bars and other such devices from HL2.5, and it will probably look better in Lynx as well. A non-standard but useful tip is that HLPP will ignore anything enclosed within <hlpphide> </hlpphide> tags. These tags are simply dropped by other browsers and have no effect otherwise.

• Small pages! Some users will access your site with slower modems, which can take significantly longer to download longer pages. Also, a page that becomes more than 16K of LinkScript will be truncated. So, extremely large pages should be cut into pieces and links put between them. Not only will they load faster, but they are also more likely to load completely.

• Use ALTs for your images where possible. This helps Lynx, too! Both HyperLink and Lynx will show the ALTs instead of the pictures.

• HyperLink can't dither shades of colours for text and background. Thus, use primary colours if you can (and this is beneficial for less powerful computers which may only have 16 colours, too), or otherwise HL will try to pick the closest colour in the Commodore's palette, which may not look quite right. Also, don't make your text and link colours the same. It's really very hard to read :-)

• HyperLink supports tables and frames similarly to Lynx: <td> tags become breaks, and framesets become pages with links to each frame.

• HyperLink supports only the simplest of forms, literally one text box, and only GET-action forms. Complex pages with multiple controls, POST-action textareas or file uploads, or multiple-form pages will not translate. However, <isindex> is supported.