lynx-dev SGML.c (was Re: Please help me!)

[Klaus Weide]

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Dick Wesseling wrote:

> address@hidden said:
> > ello, All developers of lynx:   i am  a chinese computer programer,
> > now i read your source code of lynx and want learn something from
> > it, but i meet many problem, one is there are too many states in the
> > function SGML_character() (--in SGML.c file) , i can't get all their
> > means, if you can give me more detail of these states, you will help
> > me more
> 
> I don't think anybody has a list of details of SGML_character(), but
> maybe it will help if you understand the general structure of the
> program.

 [ snipped ]

That was a nice overview.  Also, for introduction, some of the
documentation for the current libwww still applies to lynx, at least
the stuff about Streams, in:
  <http://www.w3.org/Library/User/Start.html>
  <http://www.w3.org/Library/User/Architecture/>
  <http://www.w3.org/Library/User/Using/>
(but much is different, it may be too confusing to try to use it
as a reference for details of the lynx code.)

If the goal is to understand the basic ideas of SGML.c, it is probably
more useful to look at an earlier version of lynx (say, 2.6 or earlier),
or, for a still leaner version, at the one from libwww:
  <http://www.w3.org/Library/src/SGML.c>.

> > another problem is i can not understand how you deal with Unicode,
> > it seems very complex and difficult, could you explain it for me.
> 
> I don't under it either... It's been a long time since I seriously 
> looked into SMGL.c and all the Unicode handling has been added in 
> recent years.

Yes it is ugly (although probably better than I left it after first
adding the chartrans stuff).  It may halp to first imagine that
all incoming characters are pure ASCII so that all the translations
shouldn't apply (or should give a trivial result), and follow the code
for that case.

    Klaus