Browser for DWWW

Decentralized Browser; a revolution of the WWW.

What would you do, if you could reinvent The Internet in 21st century? With all the knowledge and new technologies available today.

I was inspired by Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson as well as projects like IPFS, Jekyll, ARPANET, and more.

Note: Project is WIP!

Ideas/Features

The current plan:

• Everyone should be able to easily read and create a site/blog/news page and publish the content online (without minimal technical knowledge);
• Built-in easy-to-use editor (whenever you want to publish some content without programming language knowledge);
• Decentralized (no single failure or censorship), like: P2P, DHT and IPFS;
• No client-server approach (the client is also the server and visa versa) - think mesh network.
• Encrypted transfers;
• Data is stored redundantly within the network (no single failure);
• Versioning/revisions of content and documenents (automatically solves broken 'links', that can't happy anymore);
• Publisher user should be able to add additional information about the document/page, eg. title or path (similar in how Jekyll is using the YML format for meta data)
• Human-readable source-code (eg. Markdown, could be extended as well);
• End-user is in control about the layout and styling (just like with e-books);
• Content is King;
• Fast and Extensible!

Note: Since HyperText (so is HTML) is not used, you can even ditch the HTTP protocol. However TLS, for encryption, can still be used.

Text on Screen Flowcharts

Prepare steps

(*) --> "Load fonts glyphs (ttf)/default font"
--> "Create Font Atlas"
--> "Create Viewport"
-->[Ready for render] (*)

Text rendering

(*) --> "Get file online /\nRead from disk"
-->[Content in memory] "Parse document"
-->[AST output] "Convert AST to Bitmap struct"
-->[Ready for painter] "Paint text on Viewport"
-->[Text visable on Screen] (*)

ttf = TrueType Font

AST = Abstract Syntax Tree

Devs

Decentralized Browser written in C++20 with C libraries. And using the cmark-gfm library, used for CommonMark (markdown) parsing.

Browser is using GTK as UI library including Pango & Cairo for text drawing and manipulation.

For now we will use markdown as the source of the site. No HTML and JavaScript anymore, content is king after all.

Development Environment

I'm using VSCodium editor, with the following extensions installed: C/C++, Cmake and Cmake Tools .

Depedencies

For the build you need at least:

• GCC 9 or higher (GCC 8 should also work)
• CMake
• GTK & Cairo & Pango (including C++ bindings):
  • Install: libgtkmm-3.0-dev under Debian based distros

For Release packaging:

• CPack

2D/Vector engines - Under Research

We are currently in an exploration phase, which 2D vector graphics rendering library we should us.

See research document for more information and conclusions based on facts.