RE: [9fans] libhtml vs. <pre> tags

[C H Forsyth <forsyth@vitanuova.com>]

> I'm pretty sure Tom Duff stopped work on mothra because he
> hit the table wall and couldn't think of an elegant way to get past it. 

a `table wall' sounds an interesting object!

i looked at adding tables to mothra and had a small go at it many years ago:
the problem (as i recall duff explained it) was that html up to mothra had no tables, and could
be rendered in a single pass, and mothra relied on that property.  adding tables breaks that.
i had a variant that (i suppose) could be regarded as doing what
diversions do in troff: shunt the table somewhere else to size it
and ponder it, then having assigned sizes, pull it back.
it wasn't easy in the structure of mothra and i'm not surprised
he stopped rather than rewrite it.

| > As I said the flag is already there, In my opinion libhtml is ok,
| > charon uses it (libhtml was a part of "I" web browser, which is a charon's translation
| > from limbo to c), what needs to be improved is abaco.

libhtml's rules might not be the same as charon's because chris locke
had several goes at re-doing charon's handling of various layouts
(my experience was that it did better than originally but i still find
sites that confuse it, possibly for reasons such as howard trickey's example).
there are plenty of sites still that display well in IE but not much else.