Arachnid Preview Release 2
by Kim Howe
This is the second preview release of Arachnid, a new web browser I
am
developing for the GS. This second release is still a very long way
from a
complete product, although significant progress has been made since
the first
release. Many users will find that they are able to surf the net in
a limited way
with this release.
Warning Warning Warning
This is a Preview Release. The next release may be a beta, but this
hasn't even
got that far yet. It has been fairly stable for me, but understand
that you try it out
at your own risk. I don't see any reason why it should damage anything,
but if it
does, it's your problem, not mine.
Requirements
Arachnid requires Marinetti 2.0 installed and set up. Therefore it requires
System 6.01 as well. It should work with 2M Ram, but I haven't actually
tried
it with less than 4. Unfortunately this version still requires that
you use a proxy
server, which you must enter into the preferences before you start
surfing (it can
either be a domain name or an IP address). If you don't have a proxy
server, you
are welcome to try with the "Use Proxy" option turned off, but I don't
think it will
work. Be sure to let me know if it does. Hopefully I'll get to the
bottom of the
problem there soon and post a version which does work without proxies.
Arachnid has been developed and tested on my Rom 1 GS, System 6.01,
with
4M Ram, Zip 8/16 and Apple Rev C SCSI card.
Known Bugs
Quite a few. The code to transport without proxies doesn't seem to work
yet. The ftp
code still has some problems too. The html parser is the same as in
preview 1, which
is simply the proof of concept code I wrote over a couple of days.
The windows title
has an extra character in it sometimes. The Stop button doesn't always
display
correctly. It is possible for the content of a web page to cause the
system to crash.
Due to the very limited nature of the html parser in this release, most
pages don't
display correctly. Some simple ones will.
I want to try it!
Download: ArachnidPR2shk.bin
OK. Once you have unshrunk the archive, you should have the Arachnid
folder with
the following files:
Arachnid
the Application
Arachnid.prefs the preferences
file
Bookmarks
the Bookmarks file
Cache
a folder to hold pages which have been downloaded
Read.Me.Please this file
Double-click on the Arachnid Application. It should open up for you
and display the
toolbar. You will need to select preferences from the Edit menu,
and enter the details
of your ISP's proxy server. Once you've done this you can go
to the file menu and
Choose "Open New Web Window...". Enter a URL to view. Arachnid
should call
Marinetti to connect to the net and download the page.
During the actual download process, you will see a succession of messages
in the right
corner of the toolbar. If you want to abort the process you can click
on the stop
button. (There is a bug where the stop button isn't always drawn. If
you click on the
toolbar, then click on the window it should reappear. If you succeeded
in getting a page
down, Arachnid will attempt to display it.
At this point "Formatting" will be displayed on the toolbar. This is
the old code, which
doesn't support the stop button, you will have to wait for it to finish
parsing the html
and drawing the screen before it will listen to you again. If the page
displays acceptably,
it may have some links on it (shown in yucky purple). You can click
on links and it will
attempt to go to those links.
The new http transport seems to have worked pretty well for me, so the
pages should
load up, even if the html parser can't display them well. If you're
really adventurous,
you can try downloading more than one page at a time. The new http
transport is
multi-threaded, so you can have more than one thing happening at the
time. This also
means that Arachnid should keep listening to you, even while it's busy
downloading.
Of course the more things you are doing at once, the slower your machine
will become.
What's Coming Next?
I hope to be able to get the bugs out of the no-proxy transport, and
ftp. At this point
Arachnid should be able to download future versions of itself. If I
can do that soon,
I will make a third preview release. The next stage is to rewrite the
html parser, so
that it works a lot better, and is also multi-threaded. When it reaches
this stage, I will
call that the first beta, because it should be quite a useful browser.
Note that this
preview release has a drop dead date built in. It will not operate
after Dec 31 2000.
Constructive comments and questions are welcome. Email khowe@omninet.net.au.
The Arachnid web site is located
at http://www.omninet.net.au/~khowe/arachnid/index.html.
Arachnid PR2 is copyrighted freeware. It is not public domain.
My thanks go to Tony Diaz, who has kindly donated several reference
books to me.
These are currently on their way across thePacific Ocean, and will
help greatly in the
completion of this project. (So far I have been working with a minimum
of documentation.)