I too said some time ago that I wanted to work on a System 6 / compact Mac web browser, but didn't get very far. In fact, I got as far as downloading and reading about MOPS (the Forth programming environment), getting a working installation of THINK Pascal 4.5a1, and downloading some example code -- Apple's MacTCP examples, John Norstad's NewsWatcher source, and Peter Lewis' MacTCP library. I decided that while MOPS seemed to have a nice app framework, I didn't know Forth, and the available libraries were for Pascal or sometimes C. And I recalled Pascal apps from years past (Tex-Edit Plus for example) and how much code goes into it. I gave up.
I did have an idea though about how to do graphics. I'm fairly sure that an 8 MHz 68000 CPU is not fast enough to draw web site graphics. GIF and particularly JPEG graphics are compressed, and the decompression would tax the processor. Most compact Macs don't even have Color QuickDraw which would complicate matters, since 99.99% of web graphics are color. The idea I had was that the web browser would be required to act through a proxy server, and that the proxy server would convert graphics to black and white, possibly even to a format easier for an old Mac to read, like maybe PICT. The web browser would thus be easier to code -- it would just have to use available OS routines to display the PICT -- and would be faster, since the strenuous decompression routines would be avoided. A modern server should have no problem converting these graphics quickly enough that an 8 MHz client connecting over a dial-up modem would not notice, and coding up a script for the proxy server to do the image conversion using GDLib or ImageMagick should be trivial.
Perhaps the current author-to-be of the System 6 web browser project would be interested in the above idea. I'm happy to talk about it off-list too.
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