| [Files] New web browser for Amiga | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 15-Sep-2002 20:01 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä | 25 comments
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Alexander Weber writes on his homepage: "Path-Amiga is my attempt to write a web browser. It isn't very usable yet, but that will hopefully change soon. I started with this project somewhen in the second half of 2001, because I wanted to learn to write AmigaOS programs with multiple threads. After I had a program that could open and close some windows, I thought I could perhaps make a web browser out of this, just as a challenge. And the result is this."
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| New web browser for Amiga : Comment 11 of 25 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Anonymous on 15-Sep-2002 23:25 GMT | OK, so the missing bits of a bare bones modern browser are:
* Text stream -> DOM parser
This is the foundation of a good browser. A web page is really information structured as a tree, and the DOM is the recognised standard for reflecting this information into and out of programs.
* Upgrade HTTP engine to full HTTP/1.1 with proxy (including SOCKS) support and keep-alive
This makes sure more or less everyone can use it, and that they get good performance, at least within the limitations of their TCP implementation.
* Style engine
Cascading stylesheets are the presentation layer for a DOM browser. This engine has two halves, one half figures out which styles apply to which elements (or pseudo-elements) from the DOM, while the other half lays out the document visually from the style information. The CSS box model requires extensive study before it should be attempted. This model controls WHERE everything will appear in your web browser.
* HTML implementation
HTML 4 tells us what behaviour to give the elements (e.g hyperlinks, forms) and also gives us some hints about the default CSS style we need for those elements. As HTML 4 is implemented, building on the strong foundation, the program will blossom and turn into a usable browser.
* ECMAscript
An implementation of ECMAscript (aka Javascript) is needed. At least version 1, but preferably version 3. It can be tested standalone until a good proportion of the work is done, and then stitched into the DOM to provide DHTML.
* Image handling
Basic support ought to be no big deal on the Amiga, but all the recommended web formats have some fancy features that might require dedicated support. JPEG (for photos), GIF (for animation) and PNG (for most other things) are essential.
* Extra features
Once all of the above is done there are lots of nice features that can be added (of course lots of platform specific features will also apply). HTTP Pipelining offers extra performance on some sites. Adding XML to the parser takes a step towards future hot standards (e.g. MathML). An XSLT engine would be a good complement to the CSS style engine.
Probably a bit more than 10 man years worth of work, from concept to first useable version. Hey it only took about a dozen people to make Mosaic, and they had to *invent* most of what they were doing. |
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