[Edbrowse-dev] <object> - falling behind

[Edbrowse-dev] <object> - falling behind

[Karl Dahlke]

If we're not actively developing edbrowse, we fall behind,
and I have to admit that's pretty discouraging.
I stumbled upon this link quite by accident.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html
html4 has new ways, through the <object> tag,
to put in images, including clickable images, which are essentially
hyperlinks and should not be ignored,
and music and videos and well almost anything,
into the html document,
and also into the javascript tree I'm sure,
and yet I barely recognize the <object> tag at all,
and I'm sure I don't do anything with it.
So this is a heads up, someone, maybe me if I have time
amongst crashing computers and other projects,
needs to look at the type attribute,
and pretend like <object is <img or <music or <iframe
or whatever the case may be, and act accordingly,
as per that chunk of code that is already somewhere in html.cpp,
and almost certainly not in its own stand alone function, as it should be.
And also put stuff in the js tree, but not sure how that is done.
If the type is image, does this also go in the array of images
across the entire page, or not, because it is an object tag.
Lots to learn here.

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] <object> - falling behind

[Adam Thompson]

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On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 03:28:25AM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> If we're not actively developing edbrowse, we fall behind,
> and I have to admit that's pretty discouraging.
> I stumbled upon this link quite by accident.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html
> html4 has new ways, through the <object> tag,
> to put in images, including clickable images, which are essentially
> hyperlinks and should not be ignored,
> and music and videos and well almost anything,
> into the html document,
> and also into the javascript tree I'm sure,
> and yet I barely recognize the <object> tag at all,
> and I'm sure I don't do anything with it.

Do you mean html 5? I've been wondering about doing something about getting
edbrowse to do html5 for a while, but work and life have somewhat got in the way.
To be honest, I wonder if this isn't a good moment to seriously consider
implementing a proper DOM and possibly work out how to plug in all the other
things that we need to keep edbrowse usable in the increasingly js-heavy
internet environment.
I'm particularly thinking of ajax etc which are increasingly used,
as well as all the possibilities of html 5 (which can be used to do things
previously only done with flash and other such technologies).

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Adam.

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[Edbrowse-dev] <object> - falling behind

[Karl Dahlke]

> I've been wondering about doing something about getting
> edbrowse to do html5 for a while, but work and life have somewhat got in the way.
> To be honest, I wonder if this isn't a good moment to seriously consider
> implementing a proper DOM and possibly work out how to plug in all the other
> things that we need to keep edbrowse usable in the increasingly js-heavy
> internet environment.
> I'm particularly thinking of ajax etc which are increasingly used,
> as well as all the possibilities of html 5 (which can be used to do things
> previously only done with flash and other such technologies).

I agree with all of this.
It might entail a certain amount of redesign, but that's ok.
I'm not even sure javascript existed when I first wrote edbrowse,
so you have to move with the times.
It's a lota lota work, and I don't feel like I could do it myself,
but probably could with some help.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] <object> - falling behind

[Adam Thompson]

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On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 04:16:17PM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> It might entail a certain amount of redesign, but that's ok.
> I'm not even sure javascript existed when I first wrote edbrowse,
> so you have to move with the times.
> It's a lota lota work, and I don't feel like I could do it myself,
> but probably could with some help.

I agree, it's going to be a *lot* of work to get things right, but I think it's worth it.

One thing I'd really like to accomplish (not sure how yet)
is making it so that the js engine can't kill edbrowse totally, i.e.
at the moment if js segfaults or goes into an infinite loop that's it,
either the browser explodes (in the first case)
or you have to manually kill it (using kill or similar) in the second.
I've had cases in the past where I've been doing work in one buffer,
switched to another to do a bit of research for said work,
and boom the whole thing goes away because of some js.

This leads me on to my next question;
I know we're hoping some day to get a windows port,
but does anyone currently use edbrowse on windows and,
if thread or process management becomes involved,
how much short term effort needs to be made to make things portable (i.e.
do we need to look into cross-platform libraries etc)?
The reason I ask is that, in order to isolate the js (and potentially other
things) from killing the browser, it really needs to run separately with a
communication mechanism (this is common practice in modern browsers,
with some spawning processes and some using threads I think).
Given the state of the code, I suspect processes'd be a bit easier (this is the
model used by chrome according to [1])
(chrome is a google packaged version of chromium essentially).
Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Adam.
[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/multi-process-architecture.html

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