On Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:50:50 -0700, Ray Kohler <ataraxia...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Uriel<lost.gob...@gmail.com> wrote:
You can't have a "sane web browser"[1] with an insane rendering
engine. All you are doing otherwise is giving a turd another coat of
paint.
At the moment my only hope for a minimally sane web rendering engine
is http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
The latest released version is not too useful, but development seems
to be fast and they are moving forward quite fast.
Peace
uriel
[1]: Of course there can't be a sane web browser, but a different coat
of paint on top of webkit is not going to be any saner than Chrome,
and unlike all this so called "sane browsers" at least Chrome mostly
got the process model right.
I think it's more like, "You can't have a sane web browser with an
insane web". As long as the content creator makes assumptions of how
the user wants the content presented, and things break when the
assumptions are violated, there can be no sane web experience. And
that's still better than the model where the creator's assumptions are
simply enforced upon the user. (Of course, this can be gotten around
by just avoiding all the broken parts of the web, but I find that
rather impossible given that my livelihood is tied up in it.)
FWIW, I made a post of this sort in uzbl's Arch Forum thread recently,
and it doesn't appear that anybody responding to it got what I was
driving at. Dieter, in fact, admitted not understanding me. It didn't
seem worthwhile to continue the thread there, since I don't really
want to convince browser programmers that their cause is hopeless -
and that's really what "victory" for me would look like on that front.
I'm still quite interested in both uzbl and surf, and I'm hoping one
of them will prove me wrong and actually tame the web into a uniform
UI / presentation experience that somehow smooths over any dumb things
the content creators do without sending me back to Firefox to handle
broken pages all the time.
A few months ago lobobrowser.org caught my eye. Its a browser written in java
(hold on... don't kick me off the list... :) ) but the thing I liked about it
was its support for alternative document formats. It supports JavaFX out of the
box and that's definitely a more suckless version of document rendering /
scripting than HTML + Javascript.
I got the idea then that it may not be a bad idea to develop a "suckless document
rendering / scripting application" which supports a document format the suckless
community would actually like. I haven't looked around a lot but I liked the minimalistic
nature of the enlightenment project's evas + edje library. Evas takes a image-only (no
SVG) approach to document rendering with very good results.
Of course we would have to support HTML + Javascript too but it could be a
plugin similar to the way Adobe PDF and Flash are plugins for the regular
browsers. We could also write tools to convert our document format to HTML +
Javascript on the server side.
In many ways HTML + Javascript is the "assembly" of the web. Web frontend
developers rarely deal directly with HTML + Javascript. In this case, we could try and
write something simpler and just write tools to directly render it for suckless browsers
or convert it to HTML + Javascript for non-suckless mortals :)
--
Pinocchio
