Topic awaiting preservation: An Idea concerning rendering modes and apis in browsers (Page 1 of 1)

Ok, just an idea that struck me whilst I was finally getting around to checking out the workings of MOZiE. Basically I was thinking that with both win IE and Moz IE having essentially the same api, so much so that tools like IEPatcher (have to google that one) can simply change the reference to IE in programs and they then support Mozilla instead - clever thinking by the moz crew.

So in which case how hard would it be with an app building language or xul possibly, to construct a new browser like application that can retrieve webpages in general fashion and then render them using either the moz or ie engine.

The ideal testing browser, using one cache and only one set of files but leveraging the rendering of the two most prominent browsers via a simple toggle method.

The next stage would be to add a built in auto-scrolling screen capture mode and if the app can also interface with venkman through moz then that is a plus too.

I have created a bookmarklet which sends page info to the free 'url2bmp' exe (another googler I'm afraid) and it know allows me to do one click full length captures in IE for free. However being seperate is a little on the slow side, especially since it needs to redownload and cache all the page data (it leverages IEs renderer).

This is another thing that prompted me that if this was integrated into a switchable renderer 'browser' it could be brilliant.

I realise that development of such a project may be of little interest to some people since the code is predominantly if not completely windows only. But since the majority of the web surfing populus use IE and the second majority uses moz (growing rapidly too!) and most people using these browsers are on windows it makes sense that a developer tool would be really beneficial.

I'm still only at 'concept' stage of beginning to learn an application building language, so I'm not going to be doing this for quite a while, but I was just wondering what the general asylum opinion for something like this would be.

Even more into the renderer thing it would be cool to replace the standard Dreamweaver proprietry renderer with a switchable version utitlising installed browser's renderers.

If built with forethought I'm sure that for the forseeable future the 'dev browser' application would remain comaptible with each moz or ie realise providing the api stays the same which it should do since both (mostly ie tho) have been sepearately adopted for use within many windows applications to date.

Even tho it is unlikely to go anywhere unless someone with a lot of free time picks up the idea, I would still be interested in the input of other inmates in terms of suitable programming language, project plausibility etc.

Thanks guys.

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The ideal testing browser, using one cache and only one set of files but leveraging the rendering of the two most prominent browsers via a simple toggle method.

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hm. what about browser specific code being generated server side - you couldn't test it, right?

Ok so the system isn't perfect, but the main point of developing a browser like this is to do purely with rendering and less about code. Besides I was of the belief that serverside browser detection wasn't really a good practice to be involved with, maybe I was misinformed here.

You can't test serverside browser specific code in many ides or developement environments anyway, and this method doesn't mean you don't have IE or MOZ installed since you need both to use the apis. This is merely a more efficient way to check visual rendering differences extremely accurately, imagine flipping between rendering modes since the page would still render in the same window you would see immediately where alignment issues existed etc. You could even 'overlay' the views so that you could check the offsets etc and it wouldn't be too hard to include a set of measurement tools and dom inspectors if you are going this far so I think the server side code thing isn't that important, if you want to test server technologies you do things differently anyway, this is more of a design development tool.

***edit***

you could always choose to reload the page with different browser creds, in fact in doing this within one dev environment you could immediately view the differences in code supplied to different browsers - you could even do an auto check

[This message has been edited by smonkey (edited 04-10-2004).]