As HTML5 becomes HTML there seems to me to be a case for webmasters and web application servers to have a choice in file extensions – at least for entry points such as

· www.example.com/

and for sub-domain root URL’s such as

· proposals.example.com/

such that .htm will be selected for Mobile and .html for Large format devices.

This will be of no help in the PHP world of index.php without redirection and likely an additional option in HTTP headers and another authorized meta value for HTML5 content.

At the moment, Apache servers can be configured with an ordered-list such as

· index.htm index.html index.php

but there is no flag to set for mobile versus other as there is no field in HTTP requests for the likes of screen size at w3.org or propsed by the HTML Working Group to my knowledge.

Now to visit WHATWG.

We may well ignore or forget default.htm and home.htm by 2014 … or 2020.

Unit-testing frameworks or XUnit,  ( like the graphical panes of the IDE itself, refactoring browsers, peer-programming …) come out of Smalltalk – SUnit in this case.

I find that many people using some variant of eXtreme or Agile have no idea about Smalltalk or what a development environment was like where short methods were the norm and almost all code was visible with a few intuitive clicks. And then there’s Eclipse …

The test and code for the series is tested and developed using the Curl plugin for Eclipse.

Give developers at least 2 systems to work with; actual development systems should probably be on a separate network with separate credentials from those used for ordinary corporate computing, [such as] e-mail.

The browser is written in Curl from www.curl.com and uses JavaScript to ensure that pages browsed do not throw a sheet of white light up ruining night vision.

The custom browser comes with useful buttons instead of page links (the buttons are not “lost”) and are unaffected by default web browser version changes and incompatibilities.

The entire browser is easily scripted.

I am hopeful that this will run on Android when Curl 8 comes out …

News: added 2 links over at my Canadian Poets page at aule-browser.com

That Canadian poets page is linked from http://poets.aule-browser.com

One link is to two poems by Roger Moore in Curl poetry markup.

The page title is processing.js but the URL is processingjs.org

MIT Processing is found at http://processsing.org

A comparison of MIT Curl (www.curl.com) and MIT Processing should still be available at curl.com

After first running

do %r3-gui.r3

you can then try code snippets such as

·  view [
·     text "Example window."
·     button "Close" close
·   ]

·   view [
·     vpanel [
·       text "Show website"
·       button "Show" browse http://www.rebol.net
·     ]
·     vpanel [
·       text "Example window."
·       button "Close" close
·   ]]

But if you paste code into the REPL, that text must be unix-style with LF only and no CRLF until the code has been input.

What you will see when the examples run is that the widgets have a style or “skin” (the one I see is shaded-metallic or brushed-aluminum.)

Logtalk 2.42.2 is now available for downloading. This release improves the compilation of calls to module predicates; improves checking of meta-arguments in meta-predicate calls; improves support for lambda expressions; includes an optimizing compiler for calls to library meta-predicates; adds new libraries for logging events, working with temporal interval relations, and using integer counters; improves existing examples and libraries; adds support for using the JavaScript-based SyntaxHighlighter package; and features portability updates for GNU Prolog, Qu-Prolog, SICStus Prolog, SWI-Prolog, and XSB.

Available at logtalk.org

5.10 is listed as

• All platforms now use consistent naming. The SWI-Prolog executable is called swipl, the linker swipl-ld and the resouce-file manager swipl-rc.
• New stack memory-management that is based on stack-shifting rather than allocating the stacks sparsely in the virtual address-space. This change allows for much better scalability in the number of threads, so we also removed the old thread-count limit of 100. The stack-limits can now be raised and reduced at runtime using set_prolog_stack/2.
• The default stack-size-limits are now 128Mb per stack on 32-bit and 256Mb on 64-bit hardware.
• Extensive leak and stress-testing have fixed a number of leaks and race conditions, making the system much more robust in 24×7 server setup.
• A start has been made to avoid using the C-stack for recursing into terms. This allows processing much more deeply nested terms and provides a clean exception if there are insufficient resources to traverse the term. There is still much to do in this area.
• SWI-Prolog 5.10.0 introduces safe references to database terms (assertz/2, recordz/3) and streams (open/3).
• The number of variables in clauses is now limited to 1,000,000,000; this was 65535. In addition, the system provides graceful exceptions when encountering resource-errors or trying to assert illegal terms such as cyclic terms.
• Compatibility to both YAP and SICStus is enhanced.

On Jan 15 there was a mail list announcement that the dev version 5.11.12

has two important rewrites:

  – Standard order comparison now avoids recursion using the C-stack.
    This is a bit of a trial.  Timing shows that processing
last-argument  nested terms is about 10% slower and other nesting is about 50% faster and no longer causes uncrontrolled stack-overflows.  This is promising, but the amount of work is considerable, notably for this case, where the possibility of comparison to raise an exception is new.

  – =@=/2 is completely rewritten.