From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200007200116.VAA23739@cse.psu.edu> From: "James A. Robinson" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Gecko based web browser In-reply-to: Message from sah@borf.com of "Wed, 19 Jul 2000 18:52:45 EDT."References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="x-unknown" Content-ID: <1917.964055787.1@aubrey.stanford.edu> Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 18:16:31 -0700 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Topicbox-Message-UUID: e6908578-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 And who wants to 'catch up' anyway? =3D) 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 woul= d 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=3Dlu&d=3Dv1' > /mnt/web/new/get cat /mnt/web/new/data | awk '{...}' and run it to get LU, 64=C2=BD, +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? >=20 > Rewriting apps isn't simply an exercise in futility. It provides the > opportunity to incorporate new concepts, sans hacking old code. >=20 >=20 > On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Andrey Mirtchovski wrote: >=20 > > "Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote: > >=20 > > > 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?