Hi all, I'm getting ready to begin work on the html/layout rendering code, so I've been sifting through the fetching and rendering files in NetSurf. There are a few areas I'd like to discuss before I begin moving things about. I'm sure you all have ideas or concerns as well since this is a pretty big section of code to move out as a stand-alone library. Here are a few of my personal concerns that deserve input from everyone:
> Currently the rendering code is designed as a box tree, which I think would > be an effective design if it's moved to a library. Does everyone agree on > this aspect or are there other approaches that we should consider? > Last week we also discussed whether the library should provide GUI > functionality or if the caller should be left to provide his own functions to > display the resulting structure (box-tree). > Do we provide the fetch functions to obtain the html to process or should we > have the lib caller obtain the data himself and pass a reference to it? > Even if the lib caller obtains the html data himself, how do we handle <img> > tags? Does our lib fetch those? > On the subject of images, the caller would have to provide support for that. > I was thinking the box would be flagged as containing an image, which the > caller could then fetch and process, but I'm not even certain how the current > implementation handles this. I'm sure I'll run across dozens of other issues once I get going on this, but these are a few things we talked about in #netsurf. If I could just get some feedback on what the library should and should not do, that would really help me get started. Please respond to these concerns and submit your own so we can all get an idea as to where this project should be going. Thanks everyone, Sean
