Hi jon 

your browser looks really great. I really hope that we will be able to 
play with it soon. 

I was wondering if you could tell us what were the motivations
of writing it in Squeak for Interval. Were people
thinking to make money with it? What were the plans?
This is always interesting to see what other people dream 
in using squeak.

Stef




> > 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
> 

Stephane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
"if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do 
different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today 
might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

University of Bern, Institut fuer informatik and Mathematik
IAM-SCG, 10 neubruckstrasse, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.