Re: [dev][surf]

ihgihbvOn 4/7/10, J Thigpen (cdarwin) <darwin_AT_senet.us> wrote:
>> I want surf to open a special viewer e.g. evince for pdf-files? How can I
>
> It is surf's job to display web pages. Things like this are better
> handled outside of surf, traditionally with javascript, sh and/or
> dmenu. Is it so difficult to launch your viewer and browse to your
> surf download directory?
The problem is that surf is both a HTTP-client (a downloader) and a
HTML-renderer. When you only want to download HTML-files from
HTTP and render instantly, this isn't a problem.
But when you only want to use the downloader; things get harder
and you'll have to use some weird tricks.

If surf could be reduced to something like:
  GET $URI | html2text | more
like I used myself, but the problem is that we need to enable
link-following (which is the core feature of a web browser).
  GET $URI | html2markdown | markshow # could use rST
This though needs reparsing of markdown which doesn't make
sense on second thought.
  see `getter $IRI` # or see $(getter)
 where getter downloads the resource which the IRI which $IRI
 references references and returns a reference (filename) to the
downloaded file and the media-type thereof (the referenced file ;).

Preferably one would make a pager which supports links (think `more`
with numbered links). Hubbub could be used to parse and sanitize the
HTML and convert it to a simple (to reparse) clean format possibly
containing some style information. If this format might turn out to be
(X)HTML (isn't HTML-parsing faster in existing browsers because of
optimizations?) Hubbub could be linked directly to the pager.
Making a simple renderer, based on e.g. Dillo or WebCore/WebKit,
which accepts a HTML-file would might be easier though.

Any volunteers?

P.S. I'm new here. Why's XML so evil? If you don't have to test for
well-formed and validness, that is.

--
þx,
  - Bjartur