An HTML Viewer based on HTMLParser/DOM
Last updated at 7:05 am UTC on 22 March 2007
Mentor
Todd Blanchard (Google Account: squeakntodd)
Project Outline
This is strictly a GUI kind of task - we have a parser that can build a dom from HTML in the wild and also handles css. Write a morphic widget that can render this dom as a widget. Support form components and hyperlinks.
Technical Details
There is a package on http://www.squeaksource.com/htmlcssparser which implements an HTML/CSS validating parser. The parser generates a DOM and does a pretty fair job matching CSS rules to nodes in the DOM. Originally it was written to verify the correctness of web pages and it has been used to implement a web app that does this. See http://www.badpage.net.
Benefits to the Student
The student will become an expert at implementing the builder pattern, understanding Morphic, and mastering CSS and HTML/XHTML. Graphical component layout strategies will also figure prominently.
Benefits to the Community
Squeak would gain access to a very common media type - HTML/XHTML with CSS. Eventually, this could grow into a full fledged web browser for Squeak. Even without that, Squeak would gain something similar to Apple's WebKit.