This article is a companion piece to “Arcan Explained: A browser for different Webs” which covered how Arcan works as a browser engine. Some key takeaways from that article are:
The focus is only on running networked applications where the outermost one takes on the responsibilities of window management and display control, becoming the ‘desktop’.
Document browsing is a compilation step through separate tools that generates a signed, shareable application package.
It is recursive (an application can embed others, including itself) and can compose and interact with allow-listed local software.
Media decoding, media transforms, network communication and system integration are all delegated to per-instance sets of interchangeable privilege-separated programs.
It is essentially a browser take on a microkernel architecture. The choice in network communication program will control resource retrieval, link resolution, discovery and so on. This determines what kind of a web you end up in.
The reason why this is posted here and not on the main Arcan site is to emphasise this decoupling. It is but one possible solution, and there will be better ideas out there, without someone having to boil the ocean in order to try them out.
This article covers the design and choices of the included default implementation ( afsrv_net ), its command-line helper tool ( arcan-net ) and how they leverage the A12 protocol to form a web.
It is organised as follows:
In Recalling the old ways we take a trip down memory lane back to the days of bulletin board systems to look for good bits to bring back into style.
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