Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[MU]

Concerning News-log:
http://puppylinux.com/news/comments.php?y=07&m=07&entry=entry070702-083738


HTML-viewers can be pretty (gtkmoz-embedded) and large, or small and not very capable (Dillo).

Must documentation-browser be capable? No.

They must be able to do display:
fat
italic
add a link
insert a picture.
This is sufficient. Tables or coloured backgrounds would be nice, but are not strongly needed.

Following this assumption, Dillo is overkill
Gtkbasic has a Textwidget. It currently misses an important part: markers.
With markers, you'd be able to display coloured, bold italic text and so on.
Gtkbasic also misses pixmap-support, but that is on top of my todo-list.

So if those functions would be implemented, you could write some Basic-code like this:

PSEUDO-Code, commands might not exist in this syntax:

[BarryK]

Yeah, I wrote a basic html parser for my little EVE vector editor a few years ago. It read the basic tags for italic, bold, text-color. I know nothing about the "proper" way to write parsers, just started coding.

But turning it into a fully-fledged html viewer is another thing.

[DavidBell]

I did a crude XML parser in VB once that wasn't so different, one of the nice things about xml/html is that it was designed to be parsed so it tends to be easy to do.

Couple of problems I can see, first is I looked at the gtk text widget and I am wondering if it supports hyperlinks?

Second is that type of search-and-replace involves a lot of memory reallocation, especially if you use a a high level language which often use create new, copy, destroy old for every string operation. I have found in the past that these can seem to work well on a small file but slow down dramatically with large files (I also found to my cost once that string operations in VB take roughly 1000 times longer once the string is over 32KB).

So I think a better way to do this is allocate memory once for the processed string, then work through copying from the old string byte by byte, but looking ahead for tags and translating them on the fly. In pseudocode something like