Re: Adding the "links" text mode web browser to the base system

[Geert Hendrickx <ghen%telenet.be@localhost>]

On Mon, Nov 02, 2009 at 05:15:28PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> First of all, I'm not entirely oppossed to a web browser in base, but
> there are a number of critical requirement it would have to fulfill:
> 
> (1) It has to be small. I don't think links falls into that category,
> especially because it is monolithic and can't be used for other
> purposes.
> 
> (2) It should be BSD licensed. At least one of the three text mode
> browsers is, so w3m might be a starting point for further work.
> 
> (3) It should be able to deal with the relevant subset of modern
> standards. That includes CSS for basic formatting and layout.


Unicode could be added here, too, which links doesn't support either.

(Well, it supports multibyte encodings in an awkward way; it internally
converts everything to an 8bit character encoding which you have to
manually select, so in a multilingual document you can only display a
subset of characters at a time - perhaps that's not really relevant for
manpages, but it shows the age of the code which then again relates to
Joerg's point 4.)


        Geert



> 
> (4) It has to have active maintainers. Links is AFAIK practically dead.
> The elinks fork has some interseting ideas like a fork of gettext.
> 
> Joerg
> 

-- 
Geert Hendrickx  -=-  ghen%telenet.be@localhost  -=-  PGP: 0xC4BB9E9F
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