in reply to Perl Web Browser?

Of course people have thought about it; just off the top of my head I can think of TK::HTML. However, the module is EXTREMLEY hard to use. One of the reasons many people are discouraged from creating open source web browsers is because of the sheer difficulty in parsing bad html. One of the key things IE/Mozilla/Opera have going for them is their ability to parse extremely bad html markup into decent looking pages. Parsing html isn't easy; anyone who has tried without using HTML::Parser will tell you that. While I think a decent one can be written in perl, it would be much larger than a one person project; it would take a community effort (probably a sourceforged one) to be have the manpower to do it.

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Re: Re: Perl Web Browser?
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Oct 20, 2001 at 06:09 UTC
    It could have the following feature: automatically email the webmaster with syntax error report.

      That would make the guys at geocities and other 'free' web servers extremely happy. :-)

      f--k the world!!!!
      /dev/world has reached maximal mount count, check forced.

        Use a META tag to locate the correct author/maintainer, rather than defaulting to webmaster. The "free" places will get the hint.
      The problem is though, that almost all html on the internet is bad html. Even sites you'd expect to be better use horrible code.

      PerlMonks, Microsoft, and Mozilla all fail validation. And they're the only 3 I've tried. This is because writing correct w3c validated html which renders well in all browsers is extremely difficult without losing page complexity. These problems are increased on dynamically generated pages.

      To avoid these problems, the w3c is pushing the xhtml standard; which is similar to HTML 4.01 except has to be structured in xml style syntax.