Minimal Web Browser

This project documents the creation of a minimal web browser, implementing something that resembles a braindead HTML parser utilizing HTTP to fetch pages. It aims to implement this entirely in C, using only standard POSIX libraries, in 128 lines of code or less.

Literate Programming

The evolution of this project will be demonstrated over a series of 'chapters', expressed as commented C files. The comments will follow a particular pattern that will allow the code to be turned into a simple markdown-based web example:

• Any line that begins with /// will be treated as a line of markdown. The /// will be removed, as will an initial space, if present.
• All other lines of code will be treated as if they were code.

A simple python script, preprocess.py, exists to preprocess the example. If run on a C file of this format, it will produce a file named .md containing the markdown text for the tutorial, as well as .min.c, which contains the minimally stripped C code.

Chapter 1

In ch1.c, the application skeleton is constructed.

Chapter 2

In ch2.c, the application gains a very simple HTTP implementation.

More Information

For more information, contact Morgan Conbere at [email protected].