RetroFit

A retro-themed web-browser for the terrminal with command line.

Purpose

An experiment in minimalistic textual web experience meant to be easily ported to retro-homoecomputer architectures such as 6502, z80.

Features

• Parses and displays simlified HTML
• Using ANSI colors for retro-style display
• CSS is ignored
• Javascript is ignored
• No cookies, GDR, popups etc
• Aims to minimize latency as in TTFC (Time To First Char)

Origin

It started as a feature of the ORIC ATMOS WebBasic Simulator, running in the browser.

Versions

• retro.js is an extract of that code, incomplete, and unfinished. This can be used as a browser inside the browser. LOL
• w.c is a smaller plain C-code implementation.

How to use

Well, it's not in any place where normal sites can be used, or displayed in pleasing ways, but it's a funny interesting concept.

Files:

• ./w< - user script to call, will compile if w.c changed
• w.c - the actual code - the workhorse.
• entities.h - list of HTML entities stored in one long string, genereated from entities.json using entities.js and then sow manual editing (already done - only needs to be done one time)

Test files:

• ./w test.html - general testfile and examples, and bug-tracker!

• ./w google.com - rendered like crap; Google uses a lot of &#nnnn; entities.

• w - in this start/compile script, there are many URLs

  w.c - the actual code to render

Wants

• a modular streamed browser
• commands can be external independent scripts
• easily extensible (Unix-style/CGI-style)
• plain C to be portable to even smaller 8-bit systems

Possible TODO:

• stream download HTML
• stream parse HTML
• serial out
• ansi display HTML serially
• go link by number
• go link by
• page down
• line down
• beginning
• page up
• [ ]
• keep history (append)
• tabs/several buffers
• bookmarks?
• cookies?
• news (check bookmarks, sort, order)

Graphics

• Look into caca-library (https://github.com/cacalabs/libcaca)