2019-07-01 - Musings on browser history | |
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Today, I spent quite a bit of time looking for a web page that I | |
stumbled across back in 2017, detailing how the author | |
bootstrapped their own (line) editor under FreeDOS by ECHOing | |
Pascal code to a file, one line at a time. It was nothing | |
groundbreaking, but interesting, and, no matter what I did, I | |
could. Not. Find. It. | |
I tried looking at my Firefox history for that time period - my | |
old profile is still hanging around - but nada. I tried | |
googling - well, Startpage'ing - for it, using multiple | |
different sets of keywords, but nada. | |
In the end, I found that page in one of my old bookmarks file. | |
I would have never found it again had I not saved it: neither | |
the title nor the URL contained any of the keywords I searched | |
for (ed, editor, edlin, pascal, scratch), and they were not at | |
all descriptive of its contents. | |
Once more, I found myself wishing that web browsers would save | |
the text of the pages we browse. They wouldn't even need to | |
index them, or to save the HTML, let alone any of the auxiliary | |
resources needed to render them - JS-only pages can pretty much | |
get bent, even if snapshotting the DOM is an option - but just | |
having them save *the text* would be incredibly useful. | |
To be fair, there has been *some* progress in this area, with at | |
least one web-extension for this - WorldBrain's Memex - | |
existing, but... I also wish browsers were uncoupled enough for | |
this to be doable with a few lines of code. | |
The netrik web browser (which died a long time ago), for | |
example, never implemented support for HTTPS, and the author was | |
considering just letting wget or curl take care of it, with | |
netrik only handling the rendering of the HTML itself: it would | |
be even more interesting if the rendering was a completely | |
separate program, taking in a tree of "widgets" from the parser | |
- HTML/CSS, normally, but potentially replaceable to handle any | |
other reasonable similar document layout format. | |
Troff, maybe. :') | |
Bootstrapping a line editor under FreeDOS | |
WorldBrain's Memex [doesn't render w/o JS] | |
Netrik Web Browser | |