* Uriel <lost.gob...@gmail.com> [2009-10-24 06:21]: > On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Anselm R Garbe <ans...@garbe.us> wrote: > > 2009/10/21 Uriel <lost.gob...@gmail.com>: > > I have no strong feeling about source viewing, doesn't need to be > > build-in, but since it's already implemented by webkit the source > > viewing and profiling info of WebKit might be worth being made > > accessible through surf, it'll help those who have to debug some web > > stuff from time to time or that are masochists about analysing JS and > > overall download performance similar to firebug. Usually no external > > tool can provide this information correctly. > > That might be the case, but none of those things are the job of a web > browser, and if somebody > wants to do that kind of work, they can install some braindead > browsers that supports all that crap. And just because webkit > 'implements' most of it is no excuse, the cost is not just in code, > but in complexity of interface. Something as insignificant and lame as > source viewing is added to surf, and we already have got people > reporting problems with it. > > Also 'view source' is an instance of a much more general issue: > passing the contents of the current page to an external program. This > should be supported as this fits well with the core function of a > browser, displaying the source of a page does not. > > To put a more concrete example: perhaps somebody wants to look at the > source using less(1), or rio's win, or perhaps the user just wants to > save (cat > foo.html) the source, or god know what, maybe one wants to > pass the source to a script that extracts the img links from the > source and downloads them, or billion other possibilities all of which > should be supported but should in no way be built into surf.
Exactly. There is hardly a better way to say this. At the end of the day, a browser is a tool like any other -- it filters the data it gets and writes/shows results which may be used by (useful for) other tools. I love, for instance, `lynx -stdin -dump | grep ...` and have always wished to be able to interact in similar way with a visual browser. I can imagine many use cases -- from source viewing to saving rendered page as image. Same about sessions or cookies or whatever a browser is supposed to manage. cheers -- stanio_
