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Today, I spent quite a bit of time looking for a web page that I
stumbled across back in 2017, detailing how the author
bootstrapped their own (line) editor under FreeDOS by ECHOing
Pascal code to a file, one line at a time. It was nothing
groundbreaking, but interesting, and, no matter what I did, I
could. Not. Find. It.
I tried looking at my Firefox history for that time period - my
old profile is still hanging around - but nada. I tried
googling - well, Startpage'ing - for it, using multiple
different sets of keywords, but nada.
In the end, I found that page in one of my old bookmarks file.
I would have never found it again had I not saved it: neither
the title nor the URL contained any of the keywords I searched
for (ed, editor, edlin, pascal, scratch), and they were not at
all descriptive of its contents.
Once more, I found myself wishing that web browsers would save
the text of the pages we browse. They wouldn't even need to
index them, or to save the HTML, let alone any of the auxiliary
resources needed to render them - JS-only pages can pretty much
get bent, even if snapshotting the DOM is an option - but just
having them save *the text* would be incredibly useful.
To be fair, there has been *some* progress in this area, with at
least one web-extension for this - WorldBrain's Memex -
existing, but... I also wish browsers were uncoupled enough for
this to be doable with a few lines of code.
The netrik web browser (which died a long time ago), for
example, never implemented support for HTTPS, and the author was
considering just letting wget or curl take care of it, with
netrik only handling the rendering of the HTML itself: it would
be even more interesting if the rendering was a completely
separate program, taking in a tree of "widgets" from the parser
- HTML/CSS, normally, but potentially replaceable to handle any
other reasonable similar document layout format.
Troff, maybe. :')
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