Hi Douglas
On 01/01/2013 02:22 AM, Douglas Crosher wrote:
Has anyone considered a pure Javascript ZIM file
reader and Wikipedia
reader?
No, this is complicated to do... although this could be practical. I'm
also not sure if we could achieve to get acceptable performances.
I have made a small start, writing some hack code to
open a ZIM file and
it gets to the point of needing to uncompress a cluster. A start has
been made on the needed XZ decompress code but it's not done yet.
Great. Yes, xz decompression is the most complicated part.
If practical then this could provide a portable
offline reader that
could suit any device with a modern web browser, and provide a reader
for Android tablets, and Firefox OS, etc. Perhaps even node.js servers.
Yes, this could be pretty disruptive IMO.
If someone has already tried this and found the
performance to be too
poor then please let me know?
Btw: has adding thumbnail image support to the ZIM file format been
considered? This would be very handy for a ZIM file selector in a
tablet or phone UI.
ZIM is able to store anything, also pictures. Most of the ZIM files are
with thumbnails.
Best encouragements for the next steps on your js ZIM library... please
keep us informed about your progresses.
Kind regards
Emmanuel