Hacker News Reader

Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

The browser works shockingly well considering it was created in 72 hours. It can render Wikipedia well enough to read and browse articles. With some basic form handling and browser standards (url bar, history, bookmarks, etc) it would be a viable way to consume text based content.

View on HN

I can't say my fingers (codex's fingers) haven't been itching to add some small features which would basically make it a viable browser for myself at least, for 90% of my browsing.

But I think this is one of those experiments that I need to put a halt to sooner rather than later, because the scope can always grow, my mind really likes those sorts of projects, and I don't have the time for that right now :)

It would be really cool if it was able to render Wikipedia correctly, I really like the idea of a browser with minimal dependencies having the ability to navigate most static websites, this one for now compiles instantly and it's incredibly small.

Yeah, my mind battled with what websites to use as examples for adding support, Wikipedia should have been an obvious one, that's on me!

You're not the only one to say this, maybe there is a value in a minimal HTML+CSS browser that still works with the modern (non-JS using) web, although I'm not sure how much.

Another idea I had, was to pile another experiment on top of this one, more about "N humans + N agents = one browser", in a collaborative fashion, lets see if that ends up happening :)

Maybe you can divide the task into verifiable environments like an HTML5 parser environment where an agent is going to build the parser and also check the progress against a test suites (the https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests in this case) and then write the API into a .md, the job of the human is going to be at the beginning to create the various environments where the agents are going to build the components from (and also how much it can be divided into standalone components).

Thanks for the ideas, but I'll leave the torch for someone to pickup, the goal was to get as far as possible within 3 days, and with human steering, so I'm stopping here personally :)

I'll keep them in mind for the future, who knows, maybe some interesting iteration could be done on what's been made so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com