From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 09:27:12 +0000 From: Chris Locke Message-ID: <963959212.16494.0.nnrp-02.c2de4822@news.demon.co.uk> References: , <200007181831.TAA12571@whitecrow.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: [9fans] mothra Topicbox-Message-UUID: e485e9f8-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Steve Kilbane 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)