Re: a web-browser UI concept

[Riccardo]

Hi,

On Thursday, March 1, 2007, at 09:02 PM, Stefan Bidigaray wrote:

> Seeing as no one has said it, there's also Amaya!  It's the W3C's, 
> which means it's only dependency is libwww.  It was recently ported to 
> Cocoa (according to their website) but I don't know where to find that 
> code.

back then, when I was able to gather more time and attention with other 
developers, I burned countless hours in checking every possible browser 
alternative on unix. My utter hate for Gtk2 , its dependency maze, its 
unportability convulse my stomach and so every alternative to 
mozilla/seamonkey/firefox was long since seeked.

I'm in a hurry so I'll write as a flow.


- If you seek a usable browser by today standards which handles all the 
crap there are only 3 alternatives. Gecko-based (Camino, Firefox, 
Seamonkey, etc), Opera, KHTML/Webkit (Konqueror, Safari).

now, apparenlty embedding Gecko is a hell (see Camino) also it is pretty 
a monster.
I think the Apple alternative is bad, the performances of Safari are not 
that nice, its memory management either. Also the concept is a kudge, I 
hate wrappers of wrappers. Obj-C++ is something invented by the 
antichrist. I thought that but well, now Obj-C 2.0 is "the Beast" now.

Opera, well. We know.

the direct opposite is brewing your own engine. It is something 
perfectly possible, but it takes time and resources. iCab on Mac did it, 
2 people for many months. It is not so maintained anymore, but it was 
long the only decent browser which did run even on 68k processors ! and 
had acceptable javascript support too. It is carbon though, so don't. 
OmniWeb was also an in-house solution.

The compromise alternative would be to gather an old existing browser, 
mock it up to usablilty and port it to obj-c/gnustep. This means a lot 
of work again, but of course a place to start. The problem? There aren't 
really such many browsers and "gnustepifying" is not that easy. Maybe we 
won't make safari, but possibly a good component useful for embedding 
html in places and a lightweight browser.
- Mosaic. Really old. Fast. Runs everywhere. Motif. C code. The license 
is crap and every inquiry at NCSA was like talking into void. I have 
worked on it, cleaned it up a bit, installed condifigure (still in the 
realms of Motif). I had it running on a 12Mhz r3000 Personal Iris SGI 
from 1988 with 12Mb of ram. not the fastest thing, but after years I'm 
still damn happy. Originally based on libwww, which got fagocitated.
- there is an embeddable HTML component for mosaic which should support 
HTML 3.2. GPL/LGPL. Didn't really take a look, could  prove interesting. 
C.
- Dillo. Minimal engine. fast. portable. Gtk 1.2 and C++ (means a lot of 
work). Engine optimized for compliancy and so doesn't accept poorly 
written pages well, so things look crappy often. Project is on freeze.
- graphic links. Fast, portable, C / X11 only, with even limited 
javascript. Decent. Maybe one of the best bets! Some work was started 
with someone I don't remember... then it was left there.
- Arena / Amaya. Strange code, the latter is C++. Strange rendering, 
since it is optimized for standards and strange stuff. Might be a start, 
but a lot of work.

now, discussing with the person who attempted to originally port webkit, 
the perhaps best solution came to our mind. Unfortunately he left us for 
lack of time. The project got even a code name. Drakar (engine) Vespucci 
(browser). (*)

The idea would be to brew our own, but leveraging on existing tools (DOM 
trees, XML renderes, parsers, etc... he was much more expert than me and 
I don't remember the details but maybe I can dig them up). THis would 
give us a true obj-c solution with possibly some C wrappers. THis would 
be a portable engine to macosx too. Nice thing. Also by using these 
modules we would define clear interfaces and in the future rewriting a 
module could be easy. Also, suppose you need to display X-HTML only, you 
would need a subset only since it would be valid XML, thus you could put 
together a pretty light engine, suitable for example for documentation 
display.

regards,
  Riccardo

(*) I just noticed I accidentally deleted this old thread in my inbox