Re: HTML Text Widget

Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Thu, 19 Jan 1995 12:31:19 +0100

> I was wondering if anyone had written an HTML frontend for text widgets.
> It seems to me that the capabilities of text widgets are greater than
> those required by HTML, and hence it should be possible to convert HTML
> input source into text widget commands.

Yes. Steve Miale did this, and called it Dancer. An alpha version
can be FTP'ed from

<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/smiale/dancer.tar.gz>

There are a few articles about Dancer in the (hyper)mail archive:

<URL:http://www.cwi.nl/~guido/hypermail/python-1994q3/index.html>

(This is also in the FAQ!)

Note that the real problem is not the Text widget but the speed of
parsing HTML -- Python wasn't really written to write text scanners
in. Steve solved this by writing a scanner in C, but it still isn't
reall adequate compared to Mosaic or NetScape. Also, currently Tk
only supports monochrome bitmap images, while HTML embedded images
really should be color images (e.g. GIF, JPEG). This will be fixed by
Ousterhout in Tk 4.0. See:

<URL:http://playground.sun.com/~ouster/>

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <mailto:Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
<http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>