Re: [Dillo-dev]ecmascript, javascript and CSS

[Freya <Fr...@he...>]

> > Is there an intention to implement these scripts?
> 
> Both JavaScript and Java would greatly increase the size of Dillo and

Incidently, I've never felt the need to have java, I've never come
across any site that really required it that much on the client side
beyone a spectrum emulator and some really clever audio/video
technology. I think most Java is done through servlets and the like, I
do hope so anyway! :)

> require numerous hooks into the existing code to obtain the
> functionallity seen in other browsers.  For example, in DHTML, you
> perform special effects by tagging various events with a fragment of
> JavaScript so, for example, when the mouse moves over a specific area
> of the screen a button lights up or additional text appears.  This has
> some deep implications about the way that Dillo paints the window
> images.

I've been wondering about this, Mozilla of course has preety good
javascript support and the thing is, is that it uses some kind of plugin
architechture for the scripting, so I was wondering if we could just
provide support for the plugin architexture and just use their scripting
engine, or whatever scripting engines are available, or even no
scripting engine.

The trouble I have with this idea, is that all this talk of Mozilla just
having a javascript plugin, is I suspect a real oversimplification of
things. It surely must talk directly to the rendering engine at a really
low and nasty level. Whats worse, is I don't even think it's as simple
as having implications in the way that dillo paints the window images,
as I understand it you would have to implement some kind of object model
in the rendering engine too? This seems to me like a massive task unless
the object model is implemented in the js engine which I strongly
suspect it isn't, it's too specific to rendering and I think their
javascript engine is also used in the netscape webserver, or at least
used to be.

Personally I can also live without things like DHTML support. I'd really
just like support something like that of Netscape 3, enough to let me
log in to yahoo mail and the like, however the more I think about it the
more nasty it seems. 


> > how about flash?
 
I've often thought it would be nice to just have a flash browser
seperately from my webbrowser that could just open flash site if I felt
the need or show animations, I don't see much point in it being part of
the browser and I generally hate flash as it's mostly just used for
really annoying adverts.

> If anyone has some spare time, one project that would usefully
> demonstrate the kind of changes that would be needed in the Dillo
> image code is implementing GIF and PNG animations.  You would need
> some kind of regular"update animation" event and some state
> information associated with animation files.  A thread[1] per animated
> image using some kind of "server push" scheme may work; or more
> crudely, you could get the cache to manage it all and set up some kind
> of list of "repaint screen area x,y,w,h" events.

IF anyone does implement this please also implement an option to turn it
off! I think this is kind of low priority myself as it doesn't affect
the usability of a website much. 
CSS was mentioned in the subject line, but no-one has really talked
about it here. Of all the technologies unimplimented, this is in a way
the nicest, as it's not actually fudamentally bad technology in the way
that javascript or flash is. From the point of view of dillo
implementing good technology really well, my vote would be for css but
of course, thats just looking at creating a good browser based on nice
technology as opposed to the real world of websites. :(

love

Freya