[Lynx-dev] which parts of lynx actually handle the html?

[Travis Siegel]

I'm seriously thinking about porting my epub reader from windows to 
linux.  Under windows it's a gui application, but in porting it to 
linux, I'd actually not mind making it a terminal based app. The parsing 
of the content files is relatively easy to do, especially since I 
already have that mostly written under windows, and porting that part to 
linux wouldn't be a difficult task.  The big trouble comes when actually 
displaying the files that make up the epub books.  most of them are just 
plain html files with xhtml extensions.

On windows, I call an explorer embedded task to display the html files, 
which gives me control over the explorer window since it's a child 
window of my app, and I can easily move from file to file, but I'm not 
sure how to do this same kind of thing on linux.

I could of course simply call lynx and pas it the url to the local file 
to display, but this would require the user to quit lynx after each 
section was done.  I'd like instead to be able to incorporate the 
relevant pieces of lynx directly into the epub reader, so that I have 
full control over when things get displayed, and when to change what's 
being shown.  Again, this could probably be done with scripting/moderate 
modifying of the lynx source, but a full blown web browser isn't 
strictly necessary, since on average, the epub standard doesn't 
generally go in for most of the existing xhtml extensions, so just 
having it handle moderately current html tags should be sufficient.  I'm 
just curious if anyone has any ideas/suggestions on what specific parts 
of lynx would be necessary for this task, since all files will be local, 
nothing needs to be pulled from remote servers, simple html parsing 
should suffice, and I only need to be able to control the browser so far 
as closing and reopeningnew files goes, I'd think I could strip away 
quite a lot of lynx's current infrastructure, and just use the html 
engine, with some window controls, but I don't know how problematic a 
task like this would be, so any help/advice would be appreciated.