Mnemonic Welcome
General Info

Introduction
Screenshots
Mailing Lists and IRC
Alternative Browsers
Special Thanks

FAQ
Understanding Mnemonic
TODO list and ideas
Bug Reports


User Info

Download binaries
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Compiling Mnemonic
Other useful software


Developer Info

Core
Message modules
Library modules
Object modules
Coding Guidelines
Browse Source
Using CVS


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Website questions to:
webmaster@mnemonic.org

Mnemonic questions to:
disc@mnemonic.org

 

Welcome to Mnemonic

The Mnemonic project is an effort to build an extensible, modular, standards compliant web browser available under the GNU general public license. It is written in C++ and its current incarnation runs on Unix-like operating systems.

Apart from HTML 4.0, Mnemonic will support the W3C standards XML and CSS, which are both handled in some form already in the current version (though please do not expect miracles yet). There will also be support for mathematics typesetting in the form of MathML and TeX. The user interface is a very thin layer on top of a GUI toolkit independent rendering engine. Currently a GTK-- based version is available, but a text-only interface is expected in the future.

If you want to help, there is a TODO list from which you can pick something to work on (but please read the status update below first). It's a good idea to join the discussion list disc@mnemonic.org by sending a message to majordomo@mnemonic.org with "subscribe mnemonic-disc" in the body.

Status update of August 5th, 2001 (Kasper)

Many people have been asking about the status of Mnemonic. At the end of July last year, it had become clear to me that the current code base is too complicated and too ambituous to be maintained by a single person. It failed to have the modularity that I had in mind when we started, and I had meanwhile learned about better ways to build a "Unix style" browser. The other developers also had other things on their minds, so the project as you see it on this web site became dormant.

Behind the scenes I have silently been working on a "Mnemonic new style", which goes back to the Unix roots. All modules in this new setup are individual programs (instead of libraries) that talk to each other using normal text streams. When properly designed, this is not slow, and it gives a flexibility not possible with traditionally built browsers. You can see some of what I have in mind on the modglue pages, more updates there will follow shortly. Modglue is in active development. A second project has started which incorporates the display routines of the old Mnemonic into a standalone display program, a web page for which will appear soon too. Watch this space.

However, I am doing this "right" rather than "right now", and in addition I also have a normal job at the place where the web was born, so it will take time. Since we started working on the second version of Mnemonic back in 1998, many other browser projects of the "Mozilla" type have appeared. If you want a browser of that sort now, which does javascript and fast animated gifs and all sorts of other things that have become commonplace on the web these days, you should join them. I am not interested to compete in this area. The sites that rely on those features do in general not have content I am interested in, so there is no motivation to write a browser for those pages either. Mnemonic will instead focus on new ideas that I think are useful, like being able to manipulate the data flow at any stage using standard Unix tools, or being able to use programs like TeX to handle the typesetting.

If you want to know more or have interesting ideas to contribute, send an email to the public mailing list.

The Mnemonic team

In alphabetical order, these people contributed to the code since the big overhaul at the end of 1998:

programming:
Hakan Ardo<hakan@debian.org>
Andrew Berkley<ajb6@physics.umd.edu>
Steven Cherry<stevenc@flashcom.net>
Chris Frey<cdfrey@foursquare.net>
Fritz Jetzek<fritz.jetzek@i-dmedia.com>> (spinner)
Kasper Peeters<k.peeters@damtp.cam.ac.uk>
Preben Randhol<randhol@pvv.org>
Max Stekelenburg<m.stekelenburg@student.utwente.nl>
Jim Treadway<jim@stardot-tech.com>
 
testing and web site:
Remco van de Meent<remco@mnemonic.org>
Bernhard Reiter<bernhard@mnemonic.org>
Joe Vaughan<joev@freddyfrog.com>