Re: [9fans] mothra

[Chris Locke <chris@cjl1.demon.co.uk>]

Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:200007181831.TAA12571@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.
>

Charon is indeed implemented in a fairly 'modular' way
by virtue of it being written in Limbo.

There are 'protocol' modules for the http, ftp and file URL protocol
specifiers. URL parsing is done by a distinct module.
Image cache, again a separate module.
Ecmascript - separate module, carefully designed for re-use in
any app that wants ECMA-262 support.

What you find is that you have to implement a huge amount of
stuff that, even though carefully crafted as distinct modules,
only the browser actually uses!

Having worked with web-phone manufacturers, the modular nature of
Charon is great as you can simply not include certain
modules (e.g. Javascript) on a phone to free up some flash.
But in reality everyone wants everything.
Worse, they want it to look exactly the same as IE, including
quicktime, windows media player, macromedia flash vector
graphics etc etc and they complain when it doesn't
run in under 4MB on a device with no hard disk!

If you start on a web-browser project, be under no illusion as
to how much people will moan about your efforts, even if they were
never meant to be 'the latest and greatest web browsing experience'.
There will always be a page that someone wants to see that your
software doesn't render and you can bet you'll hear about it!

Throwing a few more irons in this fire - consider the number of sites
that use Javascript for simple navigation, redirection
and stuff like that.  It is impossible to get some pages
without Javascript support.
You just need a URL you say? PAH I say! URLs get generated by
servers on the fly, parameterised to indicate some notion
of 'session' (trying to get round failing of the underlying
protocol) - how's that going to work in a Fileserver model
for web access?

Just my 2p's worth
Chris.

(Posting from home - my views not Vita Nuova's)