The Problem:
- There is no freely available Web browser supporting state-of-the-art
technologies (such as HTML tables and
incremental loading and rendering), which can be used as a platform
for integrating novel approaches.
- As a consequence new Web browser developments are
dictated by a few companies.
- Plug-Ins have limited capabilities and they are vendor-specific.
- Helper applications typically do not integrate well with the browser.
- Many extensions (access to new protocols, HTML extensions or
peer-to-peer communication) can not be realized by plug-ins or helper
applications.
Most development efforts in domain of Web applications concentrate on
server-side enhancements.
Reasons are well defined CGI-Interface and Server-APIs.
Our Solution: Cineast, a freely available, highly
extensible Web-Browser
- Implemented using the prototyping environment Wafe [8].
- Fast compiled code for basic functionality.
- Easily extensible through C-code-generation of
interface code from high-level description language.
- The control of the applications is flexible and powerful
through the use of a (interpreted) 4th generation language.
- Network functionality with W3C's extensible libwww [1].
- W3C's vehicle for testing protocol extensions (e.g. PEP [4]).
- New protocols can easily be added (we added HTTP over SSL).
- New widget class called Kino [5] for
presentation purposes.
- Flexible parser for SGML-like languages.
- Manages arbitrary child widgets (called insets).
- Callback mechanism for handling tags.
- Supports incremental parsing and displying.
- Supports dynamic tag rewriting.
