[openbeos] Re: Haiku Browser (was Re: IDE Questions?)

Stephan Assmus wrote:
Let's assume for a moment that you have the people with enough time and talent to implement the perfect HTML/CSS/JS/whatever parsing and rendering engine. The problem is that the majority of the websites out there consist of broken code. Your browser will _have_ to swallow that. And not only that, but it needs to render the pages the same as either Firefox or InternetExplorer. And because there are so many pages out there, the writing of a *new* parser/rendering engine is IMHO totally out of the question. You will never be able to replicate the effort that already went into Firefox or WebKit in terms of supporting broken pages. I know you didn't really mention a *new* engine above, I just thought I point that out... :-)
The Themis project isn't exactly a new project; I started it in October 2000, before there was a Mozilla port for BeOS, when Be had ported Opera but before they turned over the code to Opera themselves. The intent was always that Themis would have its own native rendering engine, but given that the project is open source, there's nothing stopping anyone from either adapting Themis to use an existing engine or adapting an existing engine to Themis. Besides, it doesn't sound like you've seen Mark Hellegers work... I never would have expected him to be able to write and update a DOM implementation by himself in just a few months. :-) Handling broken code really isn't as bad as you make it sound; after all, there isn't a standard way to deal with it. IE does it differently than Mozilla and both do it differently than Opera and Safari.
I'm not here trying to recruit developers; I haven't touched Themis in years due to hardware failure on my side. I'm just volunteering my limited expertise to anyone that might need it on other projects related to web browsers.
I am all pro a native browser, with as tight an engine as possible. But the engine needs to be reused from either Firefox or WebKit. 
See my response above. :-)

Raymond

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