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Re: what is the status of the JavaScript reader?


From: Per Bothner
Subject: Re: what is the status of the JavaScript reader?
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2020 09:26:31 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0

On 8/3/20 6:16 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
The last that was done with it was to distribute it on alpha.gnu.org
(https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-js-0.0.90.tar.gz) and
advertise it on this mailing list.  I don't know of anybody using it for
a real purpose.

I suppose bundling it into the regular Texinfo release would give it
more visibility.  It's likely that somebody would like to use it.  It is
less than a MB when compressed and wouldn't increase the package size
too much.

Currently, I'm building the Kawa and DomTerm [https://domterm.org] docs (and 
websites)
using a toolchain involving docbook and xsltproc.  This works fine, but it 
makes for
more complicated build requirements and process.  It would be nice to migrate
towards an all-texinfo tool chain, assuming it can be made equally functional.
I recently added a --without-docbook option to the DomTerm configure,
but that only builds the traditional --html documentation, without the 
navigation bar.

Having the js browser be included in the texinfo releases means it would
be shipped by distributions (such as Fedora, Ubuntu, and Homebrew for Mac),
and it would make it much more easy to use and support.

It would also be easier to and motivate submitting patches/improvements.

In a separate development, I started a WebKitGTK based browser for
Texinfo HTML documentation, but lost interest in it.  (Embeddable HTML
renderers all seem quite awkward to use.)  I've posted about this before
on this list.

I wrote a 48-line mini-browser using webview:
https://github.com/webview/webview
https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm/blob/master/native/webview.cc
I haven't tested it on Windows, but it seems to work ok on Fedora and on MacOS
(with some downsides compared to using Electron).
Note the webview.h file in the same directory is just copied from the Webview 
distribution.

Webview (awkward name because it conflicts with Android components,
making it harder to search for) has some promise, partly because it is
used for https://github.com/webview/webview_deno, which is intended as
a leaner and more modern alternative to Electron, by using Deno
rather than node.js.  And Deno has some credibility because it is led
by the guy who originally did node.js.

I use webview.cc for DomTerm as an alternative to Electron.
The main feature messing is menus (menubar and context-menu),
but for DomTerm I use an in-browser Javascript library:
https://github.com/PerBothner/jsMenus
It works pretty well, though on Mac it's a bit clumsy since it doesn't
use the system menubar.
--
        --Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/



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