On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 05:58:11PM +0200, Johannes Hofmann wrote:
Hi Jorge,
On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 12:34:44PM -0400, Jorge Arellano Cid wrote:
On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 01:41:00PM +0000, corvid wrote:
Web browsers are too complicated; let's make something easy instead :)
This is one of the paramount issues in our project.
The underlying technologies and web pages were infected with complexity and broken standards, as part of a plan to stiffle and extinguish competition, with the goal of controlling the web market for huge profit. Information gathering for more obscure objectives came into the scene when the web expanded more and more into our lives.
Vested interests in this game are huge.
Dillo remains as a quixotic quest for those of us that want to browse the web's information as free citizens, trying to avoid the treacherous technologies that usually hide behind a friendly-looking aegis.
Others have succeeded in similar quests (e.g. the toolchain, the kernel, a C library, cryptography, etc). AFAIS the goal is to develop a trusty free-platform that doesn't help to enslave us more in this digital era, but on the contrary, that empowers its community to communicate and build upon it, in many areas of human interest (not only technology), and help it grow stronger as they interact with each other.
I don't have much to add here :)
I'll happily assume we agree!
Our particular success with the dillo project depends on our ability to attract more developers that provide the manpower necessary to be able to make it more useful for everyone of us.
To attract new developers, we need to show an interesting state that inspires them to look forward. I believe that now we have a big opportunity when dillo makes it into Debian. If we can make it a help browser (by providing a good interface or dpi for instance), lots of people would be looking at it, and that would also give developers the opportunity to consider whether helping dillo grow is a worthy task.
I think that cleaning up the code and reducing complexity is the key. That makes it easy and fun to get started.
My feeling is exactly. Reducing complexity is and had been the key (e.g. on HTPP, HTML, etc). BTW, corvid's suggested article is inspiring in this matter: http://jezzmo.com/ancestors/haldane/jbsh/obtrs.html Now, IIRC, long ago you mentioned the concept of being useful. It's useful for us, let's make it useful more people. This is also key. If we can find the right tradeoffs dillo would be more attractive to both users and developers. Right now, I see these ones very close: 1.- Rendering of floating objects. (very visible for users) 2.- Providing a remote control. (useful for help-browser and embedded apps.) 3.- Better DPIP API and dpi examples. (useful for developers) All of them don't increase the browser size through a boundary, as described in the article. It'd be great to have them when Dillo makes it into Debian again.
I have two things in mind in particular:
* Multiple views in dw/*. Either we find and implement a use case for that feature or we should remove it. Currently it just makes things complicated.
Yes. A long time ago I saw Sebastian making some use of it in development code and nothing else. Currently it has no use in dillo, so I agree with the removal. If one day we need it badly, it can be added back.
* The scrollbar handling is more complicated than needed. I will refresh my old patch that makes scrollbars part of the GUI and put it up for discussion. There is this sticky tooltip bug in the scrolling code lurking, so we need to touch that code anyway.
Good, I always liked this patch. -- Cheers Jorge.-