[Coco] www on coco

[Joel Ewy]

David Roper wrote:
> Ok, so lets put our reality hats on for a moment -
>
> What's stopping the coco from being linked in to an alread-established
> home network and actively using www and email?
>
> - David
>
One way to do it is to use other computers as helpers.  Of course you
could use a terminal program to hook up to a *N?X box running something
like Lynx, or Links -- I (and I'm sure others on this list) actually did
this back in the day.  But that's not really what I think you're going
for, and it doesn't quite satisfy my desire either.

There used to be a thing called Proxi-Web for PalmOS, which used proxy
servers to help out the handheld.  Because it wasn't Open Source it's
now gone I think.  But it had a little browser app for the Palm device
that accessed the Web through their proxy servers, which digested pages
and fed them to the Palm device in a form better suited to the Palm's
limited memory, CPU (16MHz DragonBall at that time), screen space, and
serial interface.

Why not write our own proxy server program that can run on a faster PC
and do some of the heavy lifting for the CoCo, while still leaving
enough work for the CoCo so that it's not just being a terminal
emulator.  I'm thinking of something in Perl perhaps, that would use
existing utilities to fetch web objects, scale and convert images, and
filter the HTML to the point that it's useful to the CoCo.  Java and
Javascript will simply be stripped out.  Images will be scaled to a
configurable proportion of their original size.  This could easily be
done using command-line tools like ImageMagick or NetPBM.  They'll be
converted to 16-colors (which will of course make them look awful, but
perhaps just identifiable), and written out in a file format that's
quick and easy for the CoCo to decode, such as RLE or maybe GIF.  The
CoCo browser program will provide a context menu for images, allowing
the user to download the original image, or possibly also a scaled-down
version pre-converted to one of the flicker-vision formats we love so well.

A lot of HTML tags can simply be stripped out, but the CoCo can surely
deal with things like boldface, italics, and other simple formatting
tags.  Some tags might be converted to some kind of intermediate data
structure that the CoCo can deal with efficiently.  Perhaps tables could
be converted to something like ASCII art, with tokens inserted that the
CoCo can identify as row and column markers, and optionally display
using graphics characters in a special font.  Large pages could be
chopped up into smaller chunks the CoCo could more easily handle -- say
screen-sized chunks, or portrait-page-style sections.  When you've
scrolled to the bottom, the last line is highlighted in some way so as
to indicate that the page continues and a click will bring down the next
section.

Maybe for complex pages the proxy server could use an existing rendering
engine and essentially produce a screenshot of how the page should
look.  Send this to the CoCo as a low-res, low-color image map (with a
higher quality version available as a context menu selection).  You can
click on an area of the image map to be sent a more detailed version of
that portion of the page, which would include text as text -- not just a
bitmap.

The protocol for this would be high level, like HTTP.  It could be
encapsulated in TCP if someone comes up with a TCP/IP stack for the
CoCo, or it could be sent raw over a serial connection.  The proxy
program won't see the underlying delivery mechanism.

JCE