Neil,
Thanks a lot for the detailed response. I am new to Racket, FFI and
everything else but I decided to take a shot at it today. I've managed
to create a web-view% GUI class that can display web pages on macOS. It
is wrapping around WKWebView which is the current way of doing things. I
haven't programmed in Objective-C in 16 years, so I a bit over my head here.
I've uploaded it to:
https://github.com/soapdog/racket-web-view
I don't yet feel that it is ready for the package catalog. I need to fix
many things and I'd really welcome help from people who know the current
Objective-C way of doing things. WKWebView relies a lot in properties
and I can't find a way to deal with them. For example the "delegate" in
the code in the repo is not working, nor is the retrieval of the current
URL (which in Objective-C should be as simple as "webView.URL")
Anyway, it is a first step towards a real Web View for Racket GUI. It
can already load pages and navigate, so it is not completely broken.
This is my first FFI project and also my first Racket code after doing
Beautiful Racket, it is all brand new to me. Sorry if I'm not idiomatic.
I'd really like feedback, advise and help with this. All programming
ecosystems benefit from having Web Views. I hope this becomes my first
contribution to Racket.
I also need to do Windows and Linux, but one lion at a time...
Cheers
andre
On 14/09/2019 23:39, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
Hi, Andre. For your RSS reader, you're only displaying the RSS items
themselves, not browsing to arbitrary other Web pages within the same
Racket window, right?
For very plain HTML, one thing I would hesitate to use is the *very
old* and *possibly insecure* GUI thing, but it might work for your
purpose (be sure to sanitize any untrusted input HTML):
https://docs.racket-lang.org/browser/index.html
You might be better off using one of the heavier text components of
the Racket GUI library (maybe
"https://docs.racket-lang.org/framework/Editor.html";, unless it's
overkill?). This isn't an HTML/CSS/JS/DOM engine, but I'd think you
could do an RSS item or feed view in it.
Another option, and maybe often the usual way, is to use the user's
own Web browser (or a standalone one you provide), and you only
provide the HTTPS server.
A final option, which could be a ton of work to support
cross-platform, but might be viable if you're targeting a single
platform and willing to support it, is to do FFI with one of the big
off-the-shelf Web browser engines, like WebKit (such as through
WebKitGtk). There's recent work on Guile bindings for something like
that, but Racket has a lot of other stuff that Guile doesn't yet have.
Separately, for navigating from an RSS reader running as a Racket GUI
program, to view arbitrary Web pages in the user's main Web browser,
see:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/browser/index.html#(mod-path._browser%2Fexternal)
(I'm pleasantly surprised that people are still interested in Web
"syndication", despite some browsers and various commercial forces
moving away from that, for various reasons. If you're making a
general-purpose RSS reader, an additional protocol to consider also
supporting is "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)". If
you later want to be even more general-purpose, look at how
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus"; used the power of a Lisp to
provide a sophisticated unified view from various
messaging/syndication/etc. formats, including from Web-scraping. In
addition to threading features, it also had powerful scoring/ranking
interfaces (both crafted rulesets and ad hoc). Early research in
automated collaborative filtering (what today we know as things like
likes/upvotes, and perhaps recommendation systems) was also done atop
Gnus. I'd say Gnus is probably still more powerful than any UI we're
using today to access the same or analogous kinds of data sources, and
it works on behalf of the user. I don't know how much Gnu is
developed lately, but it's worth looking at for ideas of what you can
build, even better.)
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