xml-dev - Re: [stds] browser war - starting over

[Eckhart Koeppen <Eckhart.Koeppen@uni-essen.de>]

Well...

the simple browser Simon St.Laurent ist talking about is not too far away
(maybe...) I am currently working on my Ph.D. thesis about active
hyperlinked documents (AHDs, see the WWW7 proceedings for a first idea,
link for online version below). In this process, I am using and extending
the Kino widget (an Xt widget), which has the following characteristics
(positive and negative):

+ XML: parsing, markup declarations, entity references
+ HTML: standard 3.2 tags, but no frames, table processing is very weak
(though it used to work pretty good, design changes broke it)
+ CSS1: mostly complete
+ parser interface: SAX-like via Xt callbacks

- not really complete: all of the above works somehow, but could need some
more work, documentation is very poor
- no Java/JavaScript
- written in C (which I hate more and more over the years, I wish I could
have used Eiffel instead)
- usable only in Xt programs
- not exactly what you would call an example for excellent software
design: not enough time, too many requirements...

Since the Kino widget does nothing with respect to networking, we wrote
the Cineast browser. It is written in Tcl/OTcl using the prototyping
environment Wafe and provides additional GUI and networking capabilities
(mostly HTTP). This makes it possible to implement XLink, where links like
ACTUATE="AUTO" SHOW="EMBED" are resolved during parsing. It allows us
further to directly implement client-side scripting with Tcl and OTcl

There are lots of technical issues, limitations and design decisions, but
if anybody is interested, I'd discuss these and try to release a
semi-public alpha-version of this beast (for a previous version of the
Cineast browser, see below). Right now, it serves only as a tool to
demonstrate the AHD model... sort of an 80/20 solution.

Regards,

Eckhart

AHDM:
http://nestroy.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/Forschung/Publikationen/WWW7/original/
Wafe: http://nestroy.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/wafe/
Cineast (old version): http://nestroy.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/wafe/Cineast/

Universität GH Essen - Wirtschaftsinformatik und Softwaretechnik
Eckhart.Koeppen@uni-essen.de http://nestroy.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/Koeppen/

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