Closure Web Browser

Closure is a web browser implemented in Common Lisp, implemented using the CLIM user interface toolkit (more precisely, the McCLIM implementation of CLIM 2, plus some direct-to-X abstraction violations).

Features:

• supports HTML-4 and CSS-1 plus the essential bits of CSS-2;
• supports HTTP 1.0 and 1.1, FTP and HTTPS (when using the Hutchentoot library);
• supports PNG, JPEG, GIF, XBM, XPM and TIFF image formats;
• antialiased text when used with McCLIM-Freetype;
• experimental TeX-like paragraph formatting and hyphenation support;
• simple navigation history support;
• can be extended in Common Lisp!

Some screenshots:

• Closure using mcclim-freetype on a weblog that uses clean CSS
• illustration of the hyphenation support

To check out the current version of the source code:

$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/closure/cvsroot
$ cvs login
Logging in to :pserver:anonymous@common-lisp.net:2401/project/closure/cvsroot
CVS password: anonymous
$ cvs co -P closure

Here is a quickstart guide to running Closure on SBCL on GNU/Linux.

Mailing lists

• the development mailing list is called closure-devel
• the CVS commits mailing list is called closure-cvs

TODO

1. Start splitting it into components, prime candidates for components are:
   • The rune abstraction.
   • Network protocol (HTTP and FTP).
   • Parsers (SGML, HTML, CSS).
   • Graphic file formats (PNM, GIF, PNG).
2. Use native McCLIM image support instead of CLX, so that other McCLIM backends (Postscript, GTk+) work
3. Implement new features, such as text entry boxes.

News

2006-12-29

David Lichteblau has updated Closure to use the external CXML libary (an improved version of Closure's original XML parser). This should bring better standards compliance and easier maintenance.

2006-12-28

Provisional support for loading GIF files without an external helper application, thanks to the Skippy library.

2005-08-25

OpenMCL support has been added to Closure.

2005-07-13

It's later than mid-April, but the current version of Closure runs in current SBCL and McCLIM, and is mostly robust against the vagaries of the big bad Internet.

2005-03-13

Currently the code base has experienced some bit rot but we expect to get it running again with current SBCL and McCLIM by mid-April. Also we did a license change from the former GPL/LGPL mix to MIT-style in an attempt to make the code more useful for integration in other projects be it free projects, GPLed projects or even closed source projects.

2007-01-02