Hi Squeakers,
I've been working on putting together a Squeak web browser, and it's to the point now that you really can use it--it can handle links, lists, headers, and basic forms--enough to browse text-oriented pages and to do basic searches on Yahoo et al. Below is a little more detail as posted on our Swiki; I'm not sure what more to ramble about so will just leave it at that. Comments and ideas welcome!
-Lex
================= http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.14 ===========
Scamper is a simple web browser which runs in Squeak. Currently it supports: titles, headers, paragraphs, emphasis, links, lists, some forms, most text emphases--the basics. Some things that don't work are: tables, frames, cookies, auto-reloading.
Why use a Squeak browser instead of Netscape? Because of all that working in Squeak implies. The code and the objects are all there, accessible if you ever need to gt at them. A Squeak user in this system isn't limitted to just looking at rendered HTML pages, but can get directly at the underlying objects which structure them; they can move within the web, instead of just looking at it through glass.
At least, that's the idea.
The code is at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/squeak/www0.2/. It is under constant change still. The system is divided into the following main changesets:
o Misc-URL - parsing absolute and relative URLs, and downloading Web documents through an abstract interface. Also includes a "MIMEObject" class which combines data with its content-type.
o HTML - The biggest part. It includes three main subparts:
1. HtmlTokenizer - divides a text stream into a sequence of HTML tags, text (handling character reference entities) and comments.
2. HtmlParser - takes the results from the above and generates a tree of HTML entities which is more convenient to manipulate.
3. HtmlFormatter - takes the result of the above and generates a formatted Text object suitable for displaying. o Scamper - a simple Web browser. It currently only works in Morphic, but it wouldbe easy to have a display-only version in MVC. I don't see how to make forms work in MVC, though; not with near the ease as it can be done in Morphic. Ideas are welcome, though!
The following supporting changesets are also needed:
o protocolHacks - supports form requests over HTTP, plus some other small changes
o governedPolling - slows the UI loop in Morphic (well, MVC, too). This is critical for the way Scamper is written, where pages are downloaded and rendered in a low-priority background thread. Without this, the background thread never executes.
o DirectoryEntry - makes the directory entries returned by FileDirectories have their own class, instead of just being 5-element arrays.
Mild Warning
Some of the above code makes minor system changes to make things work. Well, at least I hope they're minor. Point is: don't use this in an image holding data you don't have backups of.
Thoughts
Dumb dee dooo......
Contributors
Scamper was originally put together by Lex Spoon.
David Pennell has been working on the HTML representation, and pointed out the existing Document Object Model described above. (feel free to jump in and explain this better!)
Comments
Hey, this is a Swiki after all. Any comments are quite welcome.