GS WorldView: July MM



The Arachnid IIgs Web Browser

Credits: This text of the second Arachnid Preview Release was obtained
from the author's web site at the following URL:

http://www.omninet.net.au/~khowe/arachnid/readmeplease.html.

Many thanks to Kim Howe for his efforts with this amazing development
project. 

Charles T. 'Dr. Tom' Turley
GS WorldView Editor

________________________________________



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 findthat 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!

Note: You can download ArachnidSHK.bin from this GSWV folder.

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.

Ê

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.)