Re: Minimal Browser Capabilities

On Wednesday 26 December 2001 18:11, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
|   At 2:06 PM +0000 12/26/01, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|   >The best solution, of course, would be to have *rendering engine*
|   > separated from *User Interface*.
|   >Than you can use same engine with Text Layout (terminal, DOS, your
|   >refrigirator on kitchen, whatever), Framebuffer (like QT/Embedded,
|   > SVGAlib or GTKembed) and normal 2D accelerated screen (XFree86, MacOS,
|   > Windows) So far, none of browser vendors achieved this.
|   >Opera, most likely, is the closest to this, but it seems they do not
|   > plan to make text-only browser.
|
|   Vadim --
|
|   Shouldn't you be able to make a text-only browser from a properly
|   CSS3-compliant browser with an appropriate user style sheet?

I think answer is 'yes'.
But as many people expressed, they want (sometimes) text-only browser, not 
depending on any graphics library/GUI (wether it's X-Windowing System, MacOS 
or Windows)
I think that something like SVGAlib is also acceptable. And it can be that 
QT/Embedded is also ok, I have heard that it takes just 2.5MB of memory, and 
that's ok even for low-end PDA or hypothetical microwave owen with web 
interface.
To my best knowledge, Opera in Sharp Zaurus operates over QT/Embedded, and 
IMO it should be very good solution - fast and not consuming a lot of memory.
Besides, Opera5 is better than MS IE4 (which is inside Windows CE on WinCE 
handhelds). Worth testing :-)

* * *
I recall some time when I was doing some 2D graphics library/GUI on 286/16MHz 
with 2MB (? 4MB) of memory, and it was pretty fast.
In fact it was so fast that menus were disappearing *too fast* when I tested 
this program on 386/20MHz (I did mistake of hard-coding show/hide timeouts)
[ Hint: I decided to get rid from both Borland's graphics library (BGI) and 
Microsoft's libs, an programmed EGA/VGA directly, via ports and interrupts; 
this gave excellent results - drawing speed was about 10 times fatser than in 
Borland libs and 2-3 times faster than MS ]

So I think you can make browser supporting (basic) graphics and doing (core) 
layouting with requirements like this or slightly more.
Question is wether it worth developing: as even PDAs have 200MHz CPU nowdays, 
and about 64MB of RAM.

Anyway, all this doesn't answer question in subject: what should be "Minimal 
Browser Capabilities"...

|
|   --Kynn

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
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Received on Wednesday, 26 December 2001 18:26:22 UTC