PIBlog

I’ve made some progress on my Python web browser. It’s nothing earth-shattering at the moment, but it does take all the text from a web page and render it.

It currently treats each element (including the ones in the head, actually, I need to fix that) as an inline text element. It doesn’t quite do proper whitespace compression between elements, either, leading to some multiple spaces in certain places. What it does do nicely is the splitting on lines in reasonable places.

The part I’m working on next is the application of CSS rules to the document. I’m considering a couple of different possibilities for methods of walking the DOM tree and cascading the rules into each element. Either way it ends up boiling down to walking the tree and matching CSS selectors against each element, and applying rules for those elements which match, of course taking into account the specificity of the matching selector to make sure the proper rule ends up taking precidence.

I haven’t sat down and figured the bit O of them yet, but I think it’s going to be a memory vs. speed decision.

Once I have styles applying to elements, I’ll probably work on getting all the standard HTML4 CSS rules rendering properly. After that, it will be on the more thorough block element handling, replaced elements (images, form elements), and probably psuedo-classes and psuedo-selectors.

After that, I dunno… Acid2?

Anyway, that’s me getting ahead of myself. I mean, it doesn’t even render block elements yet (since it has no way of setting an elment to be a block element, due to the whole no CSS being applied yet thing).

If you are curious, you can check it out from my public git repo.

I warn you, the code is not really commented too much (except for in the layout section, there’s a whole outline of how that’s all supposed to work in there). If you want to see the magic of how it renders now, go ahead and run getgoogle.py (which, ironically, doesn’t even get Google at this point, since Google has some JavaScript which it wants to render as text…). You’ll need pygame installed to run it.

I’ll save you some time, though. It looks like this:

But hopefully not for long

Much to my surprise, my last post generated more traffic in a single day than my blog has ever gotten in a single month. Apparently people are quite interested in making web applications with Python. I’ve started on part two, but since so many people showed interest I want to spend more time on it than I spent on the last one. So instead, you get this post.

So I’ve been fiddling around with CouchDB lately. Since it’s common to store tree-based data, and it’s kind of a pain to do so in your standard relational DB, I thought it would be a good exercise to see how hard it is to store hierarchical data in CouchDB.

Turns out it’s pretty easy.

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Recently, I’ve been interested in writing web applications in Python, and one of the fun things that I discovered was the Python Web Server Gateway Interface, which is a standard interface for Python web servers, web applications, and something called middleware which can sit between the two.

One of the coolest things about WSGI is the fact that you now don’t have to decide on a specific web server before you start coding. In fact, the Python wsgiref module comes with a built-in simple web server which allows you to start coding up your web application with nothing but a bare install of Python 2.5 (or higher, of course)!

There are plenty of overviews of WSGI out there, so I won’t bother creating yet another in-depth explanation. What I will do, though, is show you how easy it is to get started.

Your basic “Hello, World!” application can be accomplished, server and all, with as little as the following:

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