On Thu, 29 Jun 2000 01:08:06 -0700, Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:

> Hi Jon --
> 
> We REALLY NEED THIS!

Okay, Alan, you're convincing me :-)

While we're waiting to hear from Tim, I can talk about some of the stuff in
the browser...

It handles tables, and images, although of course it doesn't do a perfect
job or anything. It doesn't do JavaScript, or frames, although I suspect
adding frames would be fairly simple. It has an internal PlugIn
architecture, so external viewers and such can be configured for it. If I
remember correctly, internal images (JPEG & GIF) are also handled using
PlugIns.

One of the nastiest things in the whole browser is the
"parse-tree-fixer-upper". The people who wrote Netscape and IE should be
taken out against a wall and shot, for allowing such bad HTML to work okay
:-)

Something like 75% of my effort in writing this browser was figuring out
clever ways to fix the parse tree to form "correct" HTML, so it could
actually lay out pages properly.

It also loads images in background tasks, and can suspect loading all those
images when you click on another link. It does not use any sub-views in the
window to display anything -- everything is layed out on a singe graphical
view.

One warning -- this sucker is big... 500 K of source code right now. I've
started working on the port to Squeak 2.7, and have the HTML parser and all
the parse nodes ported (which of course was the easy part).

It would definitely be cool to see this as a big group effort, to make a
better browser.

One thing I'd like to do is start up a discussion about what direction we
should go with this. I assume it would be nice to use Morphs to represent
the actual page layout elements. Does anyone have any great (or
not-so-great) thoughts on this subject?

Do we have JPEG file readers available? We used (at Interval) a custom
image library that was added to the VM, and handled JPEG, GIF, and MPEG
(yes, there's a video plug-in...)

The link to the screenshots (which I took over 2 years ago) is at
http://www.huv.com/smalltalk , for those who missed the first posting.

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com