Re: [9fans] Gecko based web browser

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

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And who wants to 'catch up' anyway? =) I liked Linux back in 1992, when
I could actually understand the various components and how they worked
together. Now I look at the mess they've made of configuring xdm and I
get very frustrated.

I think the idea of authoring an n-part web browser would be fun,
and it would let people explore interesting concepts along the way.
Earlier someone said the usefulness of an fs-type web retrievel engine
was limited. I can appreciate the problems that might occur when dealing
with unusual status codes or SSL or HTTP Auth.  But the idea of building
an engine that could automatically give you a proxy system or could
easily be hooked into different browsers is still interesting to me.

I do agree that the hard part is parsing/displaying the html, but it would
still be useful to have a retrieval mechanism that I could use from the
command line.  In their latest book, K&P wrote about a stock-ticker they
grabbed off of Yahoo. They wrote a csv parser library to handle decoding
and displaying the html they grabbed off the url. I think it would be
cool to be able to just do something like

	#!/bin/rc
	echo 'http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=lu&d=v1' > /mnt/web/new/get
	cat /mnt/web/new/data | awk '{...}'

and run it to get

	LU, 64½, +2.28%, 11,183,600

or whatever.  It's a little more direct than a multi-stage approach of
running wget, putting the results in a temp file, parsing, and cleaning
up.  You don't worry about the retrieval part, it just works. I just
happen to think that might be leveraged by other tools as well.


> of course, if we never rewrite anything from scratch...how will we ever
> find out what we did wrong, the first time?
> 
> Rewriting apps isn't simply an exercise in futility.  It provides the
> opportunity to incorporate new concepts, sans hacking old code.
> 
> 
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Andrey Mirtchovski wrote:
> 
> > "Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
> > 
> > > For Chrissakes, if you insist on rolling all your own software you'll
> > > never catch up.  Wouldn't it be better to have a functional Web
> > > browser on your preferred development platform than to have to keep
> > > switching platforms every time you need to access the Web?