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Comment by blippage | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of respect for Dillo. It uses the FLTK, and is the very definition of "non-bloat". The real problem is that nearly all website render terribly. It just can't keep up with the complexity that it the modern web. It's a real shame.

Lately I have become interested in the older protocols like Gopher, and some of the bulletin boards. There are some recent protocols that address the complexity of the web: Gemini and Spartan (which is Gemini without TLS, basically).

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+1, it is also a joy to customize via the well-documented config file. E.g. adding custom search operators is very straightforward and flexible. With some unix-y thinking, one could probably also accomplish some other useful tricks on the address bar, simply by writing a string substitution one-liner into the rc file. Compare that to about:config, Add-ons, etc. Ha.

I somehow also very much enjoyed the not-so-good rendering. One may get used to it, I guess; even become fond of it -- you'll become more focused on the content/text and less on the layout. YMMW, but I always disabled all CSS and images. Also, I only recently (after roughly a decade of Dillo usage) noticed the --fullwindow (-f) command line option. This gives an extremely nice HTML renderer that loads in a second.

I've been curious about the tiny Picolisp language, which, IIRC, uses localhost-bound HTML as its default GUI (1,2). Sending Picolisp commands from a terminal window to a --fullwindowed Dillo instance would make a very cool environment.

Dillo is lightweight, modular, one-thing-well. Extremely user-friendly, simple to tailor to one's needs. A project that has managed to avoid bloat for 22 years. Unix philosophy at its best. Also, the executable is 872kb. Compare that to, uh, some other browsers.

It is probably my all time favorite browser for the X environment.

Even if one finds its HTML capabilities lacking (I don't; I see it as a feature, not a bug), then maybe, thanks to the plugin architecture, it would make a nice renderer for e.g. Gemini.

1. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/GUI_component_interaction#PicoLi...

2. https://picolisp.com/wiki/?guiscripting

Oh wow, I hadn't heard of Spartan, but it looks like what I'm after. Gemini is interesting, but I didn't like how TLS and Unicode rules out a lot of old retro machines from being able to access it.

Looks like Spartan is already supported by the excellent Lagrange [1] Gopher/Gemini browser from v1.13 onwards, so I'm happy to discover this! Thanks for sharing!

[1] https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

Glad you found it useful. You don't have to use unicode if you don't want to, of course. Spartan uses the same gemtext format that Gemini does. A big appeal to me is that it's easier to write gemtext files that gophermaps. Gophermaps feel like a kludge in comparison.

The cool thing about something like Spartan is that you could implement a browser on a microcontroller. HTML would be a lost cause. Imagine something like an ESP32 with a touch-screen. You could create a complete browsing device for less than 25 quid, say. Likewise for gopher.

If I may be permitted a small plug, I have a forked version of the bombadillo browser here: https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/bombadillo You can use it on a terminal. It allows you to browse Spartan, which the original does not. It also allows a printing facility, so that you can pipe output to another process.

I am happy this all works for you, but be aware that my (and many other peoples') first language requires me to use UTF-8 and after years of struggling I must say yay, utf is great!

> The real problem is that nearly all website render terribly. It just can't keep up with the complexity that it the modern web. It's a real shame.

I was thinking since quite a while now to write a wrapper around the Serenity OS browser [1] that supports JS, CSS and WASM, and passes ACID 3 tests [2].

I did have a quick look at the source, but couldn't think of a nice way to wrap it as it's quite closely tied to the Serenity OS GUI.

[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

[2] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/serenityos-web-browser-passes...

Isnt there an effort to port the serenity gui (LibGUI?) to *nix?

You're in luck, Andreas has been hacking on that since a couple of months. They're calling the Linux version of the browser Ladybird: https://github.com/awesomekling/ladybird

brief discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987506

The GH page also has "Experimental Android Build Steps"

It's a shame it didn't get more eyes at time, this is super cool!

Thank you! This is really awesome!

I'm trying to figure out if the Ladybird version tracks the SerenityOS version: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

You could use it for both gopher[0]/gemini[1] as well.

[0]: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n7g%2BJlKZjPV6CRfSQL5YUWk%2BxYg...

[1]: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25V0D7DtSnZyyAp1NbgOJF2ZAFMeUy9eX...

The sad thing is having a pure web browser that intermixes correctly, perhaps something that uses tabbed, surf, and a dillo/luakit based thing for true "browser" support, browser in this case meaning: "supports more than http/https/html".

If Gemini interests you, I'd appreciate your feedback on an approach with similar goals I call KyuWeb: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/KyuWeb

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