Re: [9fans] gtk port

[Randolph Fritz <randolph@cyber-dyne.com>]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 08:57:02PM -0400, arisawa@ar.aichi-u.ac.jp wrote:
>
> Recent web pages are full of noisy commercials and junk images.
> Therefore it may be a good idea to have a brawser based mainly
> on text providing ability to get images in case of necessity.
> Then the ideas:
> >   echo 'http://www.sciencemag.org/' > /mnt/web/get
> >   cat /mnt/web/data
> or
> >   cat /http/www.sciencemag.org
> or some other operations like plumb may be nice for plan 9.
>

It depends...as an architecture student & photographer I deal in
graphics, and many sites of architectural firms would simply not be
usable without them--take a look at
<http://www.fosterandpartners.com>, for instance.  Even for more
conventionally-designed sites, a little bit of layout often makes all
the difference between clarity and obscurity--I use lynx sometimes,
but I don't enjoy it. :(

Perhaps the thing to do is port Mozilla's NGLayout (aka Gecko (tm)*)
HTML/XML rendering engine, and see what support it needs--most of the
graphic components are already there, and Plan 9's graphics model has
one excellent advantage over Windows and MacOS--it already does
transparency, which CSS requires.  Plan 9's distributed design might
be well-suited to a modular browser; that might even become a popular
app.

--
Randolph Fritz
Eugene, Oregon, USA

* Gecko is a trademark of Netscape, Inc. :)