The Sinclair QL Forum

For my summer project I took a crack at writing a web browser. The goal is to have it hooked via WiFI modem to the internet and grab live pages the way SlipKnot worked. I've gotten my Simulant WiFi modem to connect to freeshell.org (i.e. sdf.org), a free UnixBSD server that gives telnet access and has tools like lynx.

For my immediate goal I wanted to get a prototype running on a BBQL. It currently only parses Lynx dump files, since a majority of the work getting through complex pages is done by Lynx. This also reduces the size of files transferred to the QL. Is that better than using lynx in a terminal program? Besides making the process easier (just exec a file and browse), I hope to eventually be able to display images.

The current version is buggy and limited. I still haven't implemented paging down (I only spent this week on it) so all it can show is the first page and if you have links off the first page I have no idea what it'll do. You use left and right arrows to move links and alt-left to go back to the previous page. You can also type/edit the URL line to try different files. Right now my demo has full pathnames, but I'll change that and grab the device of the URL being entered and then expect everything to be there. It's useful for local pages (i.e. you could replace a readme/PDF with a clickable help system).

Give it a try. In Q-Emulator, attach the MDV file to mdv2 and type "exec mdv2_mimir" and when it asks for URL, get started with "mdv2_test_htm" (I realize these aren't HTML files so I need to find a better suffix). I plan to finish the front-end this summer but the back-end (WiFi modem connection to server) will have to wait for winter or next summer.

Oh, Mimir is the North god of knowledge...

Btw, I did look at what's out there and found two versions of Lynx for the QL but both require excessive memory (at least 640K if not 2MB). I also found a few HTML parsers, the most interesting being QMosaic. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work on any emulator but it looks pretty cool (it parses HTML 1 I believe) and is only 19K in size. I would love to see how fast that runs and if I could potentially move to HTML in some form to get a bit more formatting on the QL side (at least font sizing, etc since we're dealing with only 4 colors).

If I could get QMosaic to work, I bet it would work similarly though my executable is only about 5K, so very small. Of course I don't have the code for QMosaic and don't even know what it was written in. My browser is written in C and once I get it to a good state I'll create a GitHub repository. I'll eventually look to port it to other platforms. Always wanted to code in C on an Amiga so that might be next...but only after I get this fully working on the QL.