Re: [9fans] mothra

[Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>]

It seems to me that the reason why a web browser would be such a
behemoth is because current browsers try to do everything in one.
Breaking the problems down might produce something that's more
reasonable.

The protocols should be separate. Whether it's something as
simple as writing a URL to a ctl file and reading a page back
from a data file, or something more subtle, I don't know, but
the posting and fetching shouldn't have much of a clue about
what to do with the result.

Since the spec keeps changing, maybe the returned page could be
translated into a local language that was more stable, and more
attuned to using a filesystem as the underlying namespace model
than URLs.

For doing the translation, perhaps a leaf could be
taken from troff's book, and have subcomponents of the page
translated into something else - the underlying, internal
language.

There's always going to be some sites (or parts of them) that
fall through the gap and don't work. But that's true now, for
everyone...

steve