> b.) i think plucker is a nice start for a, well, embedded/
> lightweight viewer. but at the moment it seems to be
> targeted mostly at reading news with no bells and no whistles.
> i think, however, that having more control over the layout
> might help open plucker to a wider range of users.

More control, how, exactly?

> unfortunately i don't know very much about the internals of 
> the rendering engine, but: where is it going, concept-wise?
> could it (given tcp connectivity) become "real" web browser?
> of course, there is the palm web browser, but it's only
> available on 5.x.

It could, but you would need to port the desktop-parser over
to the Palm, as well as adding in the TCP stuff.  I don't
think that any of the current developers are too interested
in adding this functionality, since no-one has done anything
about it yet.  (It's a fairly obvious addition, so it's not
like they didn't think of it.)

> anyway, given the limitations of, for example, font
> rendering: how precise should the control over the layout
> become?  will it be possible to hand-code xml layout
> description with plucker-specific code and feed them to the 
> distiller to make it pdb,

I'm sure if you wanted to add something like this to the
parser (or even better, to a different parser!), then the
plucker developers would have no problem linking to your
project.  Take a look a JPluck, for example.  It handles
several things that the official plucker parser doesn't
(or didn't when JPluck first came out, as I remember it).

> or will plucker support one of the various "wireless"
> html flavours directly some day?

I don't think anyone has any particular plans to add this
functionality, but I also imagine that they wouldn't say
no to patches that implemented it for them.  As a side
bonus, the main parser is written in Python, which will
be a whole lot easier to learn that Palm programming.

> basically: will it be 
> no-bullshit-read-the-news-and-stay-informed or will 
> it be all-the-bells-and-whistles-nice-looking-too?

I obviously can't speak for any of the Plucker developers, but
it seems to me that adding better support for tables, and large
images, and anti-aliased fonts, etc, would tend to point in the
direction of the all-the-bells-and-whistles option.  Now, how
fast it gets there, and how close it comes before it stops is a
matter of speculation.  :)

Later,
Blake.

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