[MiNT] regarding MiNT web browser

[Tomas Berndtsson <tomas@nocrew.org>]

I'll just cut & paste from a recent mail to Guido from me..

To follow up, I can say that it's not based on libwww or any other
parser, I've written it all from scratch. Image handling is done using 
libMagick, and/or libjpeg, and could pretty easily be made to support
other libraries. 



> Have you followed the "new browser for Atari" discussion in the MiNT
> mailing list? Wouldn't that be something for nocrew? Maybe there is
> also somebody who could maintain such a project.

Well, I have to say I haven't followed it very closely. As web
browser, I'm actually working on one myself, called Zen,
http://www.nocrew.org/software/zen/. It is however very much based on
Unix-like systems, and needs pthreads and libdl (dlopen/dlsym), to
work right now. I've been thinking about porting it to MiNT/GEM in the
future, but it would require quite a lot of work.

I don't remember if it was on the MiNT list, or in a newsgroup, but
there seems to be a wish for javascript in a browser for MiNT/GEM, and
Zen isn't really prepared for that, although it could probably be
done. I wouldn't want to be the one to do it, though. Zen is a pretty
simple, and clean browser so far, with no actual support for
plugins. What it does have, which I haven't seen any other browser
have, is a separated interface API. Each interface (so far a plain
text dump, an oFBis framebuffer interface, and a GTK+, in X,
interface) is compiled as a shared library, and is loaded using
dlopen()/dlsym(). An interactive interface uses threads too. These two
parts would make it a little more difficult to port to MiNT/GEM at the
moment, I think. I would have to make it possible to compile one
interface directly into the binary instead.

NoCrew really has a bunch of projects already, and not enough time for
them all, unfortunetaly. But, if someone would want to look at Zen,
and would want to try to port it, I'll gladly help, of course. It's
released as GPL, so there's no chance of it turning commercial. :)



Greetings,

Tomas