Re: [Freedos-devel] Volunteering - Arachne

[Jim H. <jh...@fr...>]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Michael Reichenbach
<mic...@fr...> wrote:
> By the way I also think Arachne is one of the DOS flagship projects.
>
> Unfortunately there are some very basic things which makes this software
> less useful and afaik there is currently no one continuing the
> development of this project.
>
> 1) no SSL support
> 2) Linux port
> 3) uses still real mode and xswap
> 4) compiler
> 5) to many ports
> 6) graphics backend


The main improvement I would recommend to anyone interested in
improving Arachne is stylesheets support. Arachne has virtually no
stylesheet support, as previously described here:

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/235.html

It would be better to support stylesheet-driven content. More web
sites are using css for style info rather than using things like
tables. Even if a future Arachne ignored inline styles ("<div style=")
and only relied on named css files, that would be a huge leap forward.


Also: IMHO, Arachne should not be a file manager or email client. I
think the most progress could be made by simplifying the code, and
putting the focus on the web browser.


-jh