Re: [9fans] Gecko based web browser

["Matt" <matt@proweb.co.uk>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "James G. Stallings II" <alteridentity@yahoo.com>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: 26 July 2000 18:50
Subject: Re: [9fans] Gecko based web browser


> 'scuse me for butting in on a tired thread, but has anyone considered a
> divorce from contemporary browser technology?
>
> Something, perhaps, that retrieved the content via the http protocol and
> left the display and formatting to the user's disretion?
well if you've read my comments on the subjkect you'll know I agree with you
there

the document should be retrieved and mounted and then the rendering engine
attached

content creation tools such as Dreamweaver are increasingly using Javascript
to control pages.

Designers, esp. the newer ones, are quite happy to use script all over the
place and I think that the web will become increasingly unusable to
non-script enabled browsers. I've just started at a new web design shop and
many of the designers there don't even know about text only browsers and as
such don't always design their sites to degrade gracefully. I hope to
educate my new co-workers.

Anyway my point is that version 4 browsers are beyond simple html display
any any development of a browser had better take CSS-p and css-2 into
account if it's from scratch.

As i mentioned mounting the document and having the DOM exposed as a FS
would be good and any links could be followed and added to the FS



see http://www.w3.org/DOM/ if you want to see the spec but a snippet :

1.1.1. The DOM Structure Model
The DOM presents documents as a hierarchy of Node objects that also
implement other, more specialized interfaces. Some types of nodes may have
child nodes of various types, and others are leaf nodes that cannot have
anything below them in the document structure. The node types, and which
node types they may have as children, are as follows:

Document -- Element (maximum of one), ProcessingInstruction, Comment,
DocumentType
DocumentFragment -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text,
CDATASection, EntityReference
DocumentType -- no children
EntityReference -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text,
CDATASection, EntityReference
Element -- Element, Text, Comment, ProcessingInstruction, CDATASection,
EntityReference
Attr -- Text, EntityReference
ProcessingInstruction -- no children
Comment -- no children
Text -- no children
CDATASection -- no children
Entity -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection,
EntityReference
Notation -- no children
The DOM also specifies a NodeList interface to handle ordered lists of
Nodes, such as the children of a Node, or the elements returned by the
Element.getElementsByTagName method, and also a NamedNodeMap interface to
handle unordered sets of nodes referenced by their name attribute, such as
the attributes of an Element. NodeLists and NamedNodeMaps in the DOM are
"live", that is, changes to the underlying document structure are reflected
in all relevant NodeLists and NamedNodeMaps. For example, if a DOM user gets
a NodeList object containing the children of an Element, then subsequently
adds more children to that element (or removes children, or modifies them),
those changes are automatically reflected in the NodeList without further
action on the user's part. Likewise changes to a Node in the tree are
reflected in all references to that Node in NodeLists and NamedNodeMaps.