DOS ain't dead

James Howard writes: "MicroWeb is a web browser for DOS! It is a 16-bit real mode application, designed to run on minimal hardware."



Minimum requirements

To run you will need:

* Intel 8088 or compatible CPU
* CGA compatible graphics card (EGA and VGA are backwards compatible)
* A network interface (it is possible to use your machine's serial port with the EtherSLIP driver)
* A mouse is desirable but not 100% required

Limitations

* Text only (this may change in a later release)
* HTTP only (no HTTPS support)
* No CSS or Javascript
* Very long pages may be truncated if there is not enough RAM available

Home: https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb
Releases: https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases

---
Forum admin

Nice, this may be usefull for my little HP 200LX. Can it also open offline HTML files? I didn't managed working PCMCIA network adapter on it due to some HW issues...
EDIT: yes it can, passing file name as argument. It even cannot format text in simple tables. What key to follow the link? And yes, it runs on HP 200LX, quite reasonable speed, I opened 168kB file and it was truncated but somewhere near the end, more than 64k boundary. Unfortunatelly doesn't display diacritics. For some reason the monotype font was rendered ~2x bigger than standard font.
But good at start, I hope it will be improving :)

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Microweb was updated according my suggestions to ver 0.4 and now rendered pages looks better.
http://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases/tag/v0.4

This release includes simple text encoding support that maps extended character sets to the closest available Latin character. Support for UTF-8 Latin1 supplement and Latin Extended A pages, plus support for Windows-1250 and Windows-1252.

Image tags are now parsed with alt tags displayed.

'pre' and 'code' tags are now parsed and a mono space font is available.

Boot disk images include a minimal FreeDOS installation with an NE2000 packet driver. Can be used to test with PCem (set network address 0x300 with IRQ 3 for your emulated network interface)

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Microweb was updated:

https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases


Alpha release v0.5

Now includes support for CGA, EGA, VGA and Hercules display modes. Note that in Hercules mode, the mouse cursor is currently not visible.

Several improvements to parsing and rendering. Images are now displayed as boxes with alt tag text.

Boot disk images include a minimal FreeDOS installation with an NE2000 packet driver. Can be used to test with PCem (set network address 0x300 with IRQ 3 for your emulated network interface)

Cool, getting better :)
BTW It also runs under Win10 x64 via NTVDMx64 so I don't need reboot to DOS/launch VM just for a quick test...

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Microweb was updated:

https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases

Alpha release v0.51

Improved memory management so larger pages can be loaded. Fixed some layout bugs.

> Improved memory management so larger pages can be loaded. Fixed some layout
> bugs.

Cool :) Is there still some limit or are you able to render just some "window" of HTML of any size?

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Microweb was updated:

Home: https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb
Releases: https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases


-0-0-0-0-

Version 0.53
08 Jul 2023

Changes since last release:

- Added support for 640x400 mode used by Olivetti M24, AT&T PC 6300, Compaq Portable II/III, and Toshiba T3100 (thanks to @mlaux )

- Updated mTCP library to version to 2023-03-31

0.53 seems to have a broken URL parser. It parses relative urls wrongly. The same with named targets.

Corresponding issue reports:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/issues/23
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/issues/24

These seem to be connected.

Just released:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases/tag/v2.0

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Just released:
> https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases/tag/v2.0

The author closed my bug report, so the URL parsing bug should be corrected in the 2.0.

We also got a new picture on the GitHub showing MicroWeb rendering a GIF image (on VGA). Image support is limited to GIF images. Apparently, JPEG and PNG are not loaded, but the dimensions and size are calculated for placeholders.

I tested this on ST-DOS. Characters that are not 7-bit ASCII don't work, and also character escape sequences like & auml; and & ouml; don't work. (Also this forum doesn't seem to escape them correctly.) Also it seems to somehow parse the link targets completely wrong. Most links just lead to a page that has address "=" without quotes. It probably reads the string from a null pointer.

Without fixing these bugs it isn't really usable.

> I tested this on ST-DOS. Characters that are not 7-bit ASCII don't work,
> and also character escape sequences like & auml; and & ouml; don't work.
> (Also this forum doesn't seem to escape them correctly.) Also it seems to
> somehow parse the link targets completely wrong. Most links just lead to a
> page that has address "=" without quotes. It probably reads the string from
> a null pointer.
>
> Without fixing these bugs it isn't really usable.

Since it use most of things from Watcom's C runtime, that means either their runtime library and/or your DOS implementation have problems.

That is one of the most buggy bug reports ever. you should know better.

> I tested this on ST-DOS.
if you find errors it would be helpful if you tested it on MS/FreeDOS as well as ST-DOS so far is certainly special.


> Characters that are not 7-bit ASCII> don't work,
> and also character escape sequences like & auml; and & ouml; don't work.
Whatever "don't work" means:
  doesn't print a character at all
  prints the correct ascii letter in the wrong font page?
  shows some unwanted letter
  whatever else?

Note that this is text mode only.

> (Also this forum doesn't seem to escape them correctly.)
Yes; that's known forever. It's a DOS forum.

> somehow parse the link targets completely wrong. Most links just lead to a
> page that has address "=" without quotes. It probably reads the string from
> a null pointer.
Bug reports containing the word "most" are offensive if not accompanied by some "do work" and some "don't work" examples.

> Without fixing these bugs it isn't really usable.
It's much easier for the developers to fix bugs if they get reasonable bug reports.

> > (Also this forum doesn't seem to escape them correctly.)
> Yes; that's known forever. It's a DOS forum.

@Tom and @samwdpckr: In which way is the forum wrong?

> > Without fixing these bugs it isn't really usable.
> It's much easier for the developers to fix bugs if they get reasonable bug
> reports.



Citing Welcome to "DOS ain't dead"!:

If you want helpful responses, be sure to understand the following articles.
Both articles are available in many different languages.
* How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric S. Raymond, Rick Moen
* How to Report Bugs Effectively by Simon Tatham

---
Forum admin