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	Kino Kino is an experimental XML parser and CSS render, used as a runtime environment for Active Hypertext Documents. The XML and CSS capabilities do not conform to the respective standards, however enough features are implemented to process and display XML documents with CSS stylesheets. Kino is implemented in portable C, with adapter layers for the X Toolkit and Gtk. Version: 2.5.0 Author: Eckhart Köppen License: LGPL 2.0 Download: kino-2.5.0.tar.gz

Usage

The Kino package is a library and at least the parser component should be easy to incorporate into existing or new programs. It comes as a gzipped tar file which expands into a subdirectory. Since the package is maintained using libtool, automake and autoconf, configuration and compilation is straightfoward:

./configure
make

and optionally

make install

To see some basic operations with the Kino parser, check out the simple application under test/parsertest.c. It looks quite complicated to just parse a simple XML text, but the initial steps to set up the parser, the document and the root element can be packaged into a convenience function.

To display the parsed document, create an instance of the Kino widget, pass it the document using KinoSetDocument and issue a KinoRelayout.

There is also a short Tcl script which uses the new Tcl wrapper to show how the parser can be used. The script and another small script that shows how a parsed tree can be traversed using the DOM functions can be found in the doc subdirectory.

Implementation

Unfortunately, the developer documentation is still very sparse. However, the interface is documented in an XML file which is also used to generate wrappers for SWIG. In addition, there are example programs under the test subdirectory, beyond that, the DOM specification at the W3 Consortium somewhat describes the interface to the underlying data structures.

The Kino package consists of three parts:

• The XML parser library which handles most of XML, HTML and CSS including markup declarations and entity references. The parser is event- and tree-based, allowing the registration of event handlers for parser events such as tags and later working on the constructed parse tree using a DOM interface. It is however not completely XML 1.0 compliant!
• The widget library which provides an Xt widget to be used under the X Window System. A Gtk widget is currently only partly implemented.
• The AHD part which brings scripting support into the Kino package (see also the pages on Active Hypertext Documents).

There are also some papers available on the architecutre of the Kino processor, applications using Kino and related research based on Kino:

• Implement, Gustaf! The Kino XML / CSS Processor : Extended Abstract to be included in the Proceedings of the 8th WWW Conference. You can also take a look at the original submission which is more detailed and might help more for understanding of the Kino processor. Note however that it is not up to date anymore!
• Cineast - An extensible Web Browser : This paper describes a compact web client implemented with a predecessor of the Kino package. It is part of the Wafe environment.
• A Practical Approach towards Active Hyperlinked Documents : Here, some of the ideas concerning XML scripting are given.

Files

kino-2.5.0.tar.gz