[Oberon] Text search + FTP

[edgar at edgarschwarz.de]

John Drake <jmdrake_98 at yahoo.com>
> > Are you making the code available [for beta
> > testers].
> Yes.  In the process now of deciding where to host
> it.  Thinking seriously about SourceForge. Perhaps
> an "Oberon Sys 3 enhancements" project?  I thought
> about pasting the new code (about 139 lines) to the
> Wiki, but I wasn't sure if that was appropriate.
At least it should work :-) So if you like you can try it.
OTOH after months of being occupied with other more pressing matters
I started my WebDAV server on webdav.ethz.ch again.
And I will have look into the problems there are.
The difficult part is that I fear that these are not WebDAV but TCP/IP/HTTP
problems.

> > BTW is 'WebNavigator' usefull for local files ?
> > It sounds like being intended for inet searching ?
> 
> WebNavigator is an HTML 4.0 web browser.  (Think
> "Netscape Navigator".)  It was a student project.
> I recall the author asking for help with it some
> time back, but I don't know if anyone ever 
> responded.  Anyway the parser works pretty good 
> (I've used it in a project at work to parse HTML
> output from a statistics program), and it renders
> some pages nicely, but it needs a lot of work.
> In some ways the HTML 2.0 parser that comes with
> Oberon is more sophisticated since it can handle
> forms.  (WebNavigator can't handle Google for
> instance, but the built in HTML 2.0 parser can).
> Incidently this means that WebNavigator currently
> can't handle editing the Wiki either.  
> Unfortunately the HTML 2.0 browser doesn't seem
> to be able to handle the Wiki either.  You can
> edit a page but your edits don't get saved.
> I wonder if this has something to do with Oberon's
> weak (practically non existent) support for cookies?
Bad news :-(
But I don't think it's possible for the (very small) Oberon community
to provide a better browser. Even if it's perhaps not giving
many academic laurels I think that an OS which hasn't at
least some decent capabilities for browsing the Web doesn't have
a great appeal to new people. So I can only beg ETH to invest some
energy e.g. to integrate the good stuff from WebNavigator (Some support for
frames and CSS) into the standard browser.
A decent browser is basic stuff nowadays which is expected of an OS of any
value. Or what about a WINE for Oberon ? I just installed it on my Debian
today to see what it's capable of. 

> Anyway Google does support XMLRPC.  And since 
> we have an XMLRPC client it should be possible to
> build a Google search client in Oberon.
I saw that you tried to upload XMLRPC.Mod to webdav.ethz.ch and that you
didn't succeed. The file only has 512 bytes and half of them are junk.
I assume that there are still problems somewhere in TCP/IP which are probably
also the cause of the FTP problems discussed recently.
AFAIK there was a major rewrite of the Aos TCP/IP and this wasn't simple.
Even when upload from Aos worked also for files of more than e.g. 50K I had
problems with uploading files of this size from NO.
So is there any hope that NOs TCP/IP will be fixed to work with Aos (Assuming
for now that it has a problem) ?
Having finished some other things I problably will have a closer look at
WebDAV again the next weeks.

Cheers, Edgar