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1. Embed this notice
   alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 12:46:38 JST alcinnz

   In brief how'd I reimplement a browser engine hardware-on-up?

   I'd start with a processor geared towards parsing & rearranging bytes. As well as a basic microcontroller supplying core tasks like time & randomness, an NPU for interpreting speech & translating webpages, & a few other things.

   I'd include object capabilities at a hardware/firmware level, as well as cooperative multitasking.

   The OS would primarily be parsers for various file systems & network protocols!

   1/3?

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:04:54 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     To load & render a webpage to speech I'd typically use the following pipelines:

     relative URL -> absolute URL -(cached)-> HTTP -> TLS -> TCP -> IP -> WiFi -> radio waves; cached-DNS sidestop.

     radiowaves -> WiFi -> IP -> TCP -> TLS -> HTTP -> deflate -> latin1? -> HTML ->
     * linktable -> parser for transcribed speech to URLs & announcements.
     * CSS -(multi-step)-> element-stack parser
     * -(via CSS)-> styletree -> SSML -> phonemes -> sfx -> soundwaves
     * Or render forms via VoiceXML.

     2/4?

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:10:54 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     Several variations of these pipelines would be supported!

     If we want visual output I'd introduce a graphics card with a "layout coprocessor" to traverse (binary) trees negotiating position information & a "compositor coprocessor" which combines an arbitrary number of "sprites" with a couple texture fetches or multiply-sums per clockcycle. That compositor could also do offscreen renders for optimization, hittesting, etc.

     Text layout would be the main bottleneck to handle a myriad of alphabets!

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:15:28 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     To program that graphics card I'd build up to a DSL whereby I can specify a bunch of inter-related layout formulas for the compiler to infer the control-flow. Syntactic sugar to match CSS constructs could make for a nice graphics API outputting to the compositor...

     The final layout would be cached to speed up animations & scrolling! Or editing the text.

     And then we'd need to introduce a desktop through which to interact with the system...

     4/5!

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:22:06 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     Software updates would be shipped via BitTorrent (or cached HTTP + Zip) in source code form. Since this hardware is well suited to compiling its own code!

     I discussed email, XMPP, & SRTP comms in this framework, necessitating notifications & contacts.

     I'd build a suite of debugging, unittesting, benchmarking, fuzzing, etc devtools available via a dropdown menu when viewing the code.

     For collaboration I'd use AutoMerge, including over SRTP videocalls. Include an editor-framework for that!
     5/5!

   • Embed this notice
     Curtis Carter (codingcoyote@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:40:30 JST Curtis Carter

     in reply to

     @alcinnz I feel like #bittorrent got some stigma due to its use with illegal file sharing, but if it facilitated p2p distribution so well, it's a shame not to utilize it more for legitimate file sharing (it's easily the best way to distribute Linux distro liveCD iso's)

     alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 01:07:34 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     @codingcoyote I'm already planning to publish some similar language at https://adrian.geek.nz/from-scratch#browsers-from-logic-gates ...

   • Embed this notice
     Bill Seitz (billseitz@toolsforthought.social)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 01:21:34 JST Bill Seitz

     in reply to

     • Curtis Carter

     @codingcoyote @alcinnz
     and sync http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/BitTorrentSync
     and was even doing chat http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2014-09-17-BittorrentBleepMessaging