Scamper Re: [ANN] Working SSL In Squeak

David Faught dave.faught at gmail.com
Wed Oct 11 13:03:32 UTC 2006


Karl wrote:
>Todd Blanchard skrev:
>> On Oct 9, 2006, at 11:23 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:

>>> As far as I know Scamper parses HTML just fine.  If you think not,
>>> maybe lobby to get Scamper using your parser?  What is better about
>>> it?

>> It understands CSS.
>> It understands DOCTYPEs
>> It understands W3C DOCTYPE definitions for the various
>> HTML/XHTMLstandards and can use them to guess about and recover from
>> malformed HTML.  It can download new DOCTYPES and use them. This
>> makes  it somewhat future proof.
>>
>> It has support for more modern tags like DIV and SPAN (missing in
>> Scamper).

>This sounds good :-)

>> The only thing it is missing to be on par with modern browser like
>> Firefox is Javascript support - which could be added either via a
>> SpiderMonkey plugin, or a native JS interpreter, and plugin support.

>Sounds like building Scamper on top of your parser is a good idea.

When I played a little with trying to get Jon Hyland's MediaView
browser working, I was never able to get Todd's HTML parser to load
properly in a normal Squeak image.  I was looking at possibly using
Josh Gargus's port of Cassowary as a screen layout manager, since it
seems to be made for just this kind of application.

Here are a few observations:
. Scamper has some understanding of MIME which MediaView doesn't.
. Scamper is based on Morphic.
. MediaView has lots of rendering code for different HTML elements,
but I believe is dependent on a screen layout manager that was a
separate (not included) part of the customized environment that
MediaView was part of.
. MediaView does NOT use Morphic, but instead uses Forms and more
direct interaction with the Display.
. Todd's HTML parser has the advantages he listed above.
. Cassowary is "an incremental constraint solving toolkit that
efficiently solves systems of linear equalities and inequalities."
>From reading its documentation, I believe that it could be quite
useful as a screen layout manager.
. There has been some talk lately on the list of dropping HTTPSocket
in favor of Steven Waring's HTTPClient code.  In most respects that
would probably be a good move.
. It would be desirable to use ToolBuilder, so that a new web browser
could be used in Morphic, Tweak, MVC and whatever else is built on the
ToolBuilder API.

So there are lots of parts to choose from, but I think integration
might be a challenge.



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