I am trying to get a foothold in the architecture of Mozilla. I have
some understanding of what goes where, but I cannot seem to get a grasp
of the fundamental core. If I stripped off every bell and every wistel
and everything not needed to do this:
hattons@hostname:~ > mozilla &
and hit a page with
<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY><H1>hello world</H1></BODY><HTML>
and see "hello world" in a window, what components of Mozilla would be
remaining? I.e., what is the core of this beast? I know there is a NSPR
sitting between the browser and the OS. What else is needed for the
most basic functionality? Perhaps some of what I'm looking for is in
the NSPR.
This seems to be a barrier to entry into the wonderful world of hacking
the Lizard. I suspect I'm not the only one who come to mozilla.org looks
around and feels completely lost.
Pictures! Show me pictures!
_____________________
| lots of cool stuff |
| that provides mail, |
| news, SSL, CSS, XUL |
| etc. |
|_____________________|
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
| | | | |
V V V V V
_____________________
| Something opens and |
| closes windows, |
| makes network |
| connections |
| and displays text, |
| etc. |
| What is this, and |
| how does it work? |
|_____________________|
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
| | | | |
V V V V V
_____________________
| NSPR Abstraction |
| Layer. |
|_____________________|
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
| | | | |
V V V V V
_____________________
|Operating System |
|_____________________|
Then list the interface methods without a lot of noise so we can see the
essential elements of the components as they present themselves to their
neighbors.
Thanks for listening,
Steven
