From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200302051754.h15HspO01753@fine1008.math.princeton.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: John Stalker Subject: [9fans] Webbrowser Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 12:54:50 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4f3de050-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 From martin@familie-kielhorn.de: >Hi, >in Linux I do use links >(http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/) >as my standard browser... Most of the responses to this were confused. Links was originally just a text browser. It now has a graphics mode which can do X, but it is just as happy running with SVGALib, on the linux frame buffer, or in various more arcane ways. Take a look at the link for details. I don't think the suggestion was to port the text mode, but only the graphics mode. My feeling, and yes I have looked at the links sources in the past, is that this can definitely be done. It would also be a good thing. Links is actually better than mozilla, konqueror, etc. in many respects. It is the browser I use most often even on machines that have all of those installed. From Scott Schwartz >Frankly, if web browsers interpreted any one of troff macros, ditroff, >or dvi (with shell escapes removed), the world would be a better place, >because then we could generate nicely typeset and nicely portable >documents that could be widely and reliably displayed. So my proposal is >this: get someone else to teach mozilla to grok the formats listed above. >The killer app is that you can then view good old unix manpages in a >modern mode! This comment confused me. I already look at man pages, nicely hyperlinked, in my web browser (usually links) all the time. Not just for all three free BSD's, but for plan9 as well. In general, though, having dvi web pages seems like a step in the wrong direction. The original idea of the web was that the writer of a page leaves the business of how things are displayed up to the browser. One shouldn't even assume that the browser is visual, as anyone visually impaired can tell you. Of course, if you need precise control over how things are formatted then dvi is much better, which is why I write articles in TeX. But the web serves a different purpose most of the time, which is why xdvi is a separate application which my browser invokes when I need it. From martin@familie-kielhorn.de again: >I consider this project as solvable -- a whole web browser will probably >be much more complicated, probably I will never manage to write my own >portable web browser. For what it's worth here is my opinion: Yes, it can be done. Yes, it should be done. No, I am not going to do it. Sorry. -- John Stalker Department of Mathematics Princeton University (609)258-6469