Sending Information to Servers

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So far, our browser has seen the web as read only—but when you post on Facebook, fill out a survey, or search Google, you’re sending information to servers as well as receiving information from them. In this chapter, we’ll start to transform our browser into a platform for web applications by building out support for HTML forms, the simplest way for a browser to send information to a server.

How forms work

HTML forms have a couple of moving pieces.

First, in HTML, there is a form element, which contains input elements,There are other elements similar to input, such as select and textarea. They work similarly enough; they just represent different kinds of user controls, like dropdowns and multi-line inputs. which in turn can be edited by the user. So a form might be written like this:

<form action="/submit" method="post">
    <p>Name: <input name=name value=1></p>
    <p>Comment: <input name=comment value=2></p>
    <p><button>Submit!</button></p>
</form>

And look like this:

The example form in our browser

This form contains two text entry boxes called name and comment. When the user goes to this page, they can click on those boxes to edit their values. Then, when they click the button at the end of the form, the browser collects all of the name/value pairs and bundles them into an HTTP POST request (as indicated by the method attribute), sent to the URL given by the form element’s action attribute, with the usual rules of relative URLs—so in this case, /submit. The POST request looks like this:

POST /submit HTTP/1.0
Host: example.org
Content-Length: 16

name=1&comment=2

In other words, it’s a lot like the regular GET requests we’ve already seen, except that it has a body—you’ve already seen HTTP responses with bodies, but requests can have them too. Note the Content-Length header; it’s mandatory for POST requests. The server responds to this request with a web page, just like normal, and the browser then does everything it normally does.

Implementing forms requires extending many parts of the browser, from implementing HTTP POST through new layout objects that draw input elements to handling buttons clicks. That makes it a great starting point for transforming our browser into an application platform, our goal for these next few chapters. Let’s get started implementing it all!

HTML forms were first standardized in HTML+, which also proposed tables, mathematical equations, and text that wraps around images. Amazingly, all three of these technologies survive, but in totally different standards: tables in RFC 1942, equations in MathML, and floating images in CSS 1.0.

Rendering widgets

First, let’s draw the input areas that the user will type into.Most applications use OS libraries to draw input areas, so that those input areas look like other applications on that OS. But browsers need a lot of control over application styling, so they often draw their own input areas. Input areas are inline content, laid out in lines next to text. So to support inputs we’ll need a new kind of layout object, which I’ll call InputLayout. We can copy TextLayout and use it as a template, though we’ll need to make some quick edits.

First, there’s no word argument to InputLayouts:

class InputLayout:
    def __init__(self, node, parent, previous):
        self.node = node
        self.children = []
        self.parent = parent
        self.previous = previous

Second, input elements usually have a fixed width:

INPUT_WIDTH_PX = 200

class InputLayout:
    def layout(self):
        # ...
        self.width = INPUT_WIDTH_PX
        # ...

The input and button elements need to be visually distinct so the user can find them easily. Our browser’s styling capabilities are limited, so let’s use background color to do that:

input {
    font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;
    background-color: lightblue;
}
button {
    font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;
    background-color: orange;
}

When the browser paints an InputLayout it needs to draw the background:

class InputLayout:
    def paint(self):
        cmds = []
        bgcolor = self.node.style.get("background-color",
                                      "transparent")
        if bgcolor != "transparent":
            rect = DrawRect(self.self_rect(), bgcolor)
            cmds.append(rect)
        return cmds

It then needs to get the input element’s text contents:

class InputLayout:
    def paint(self):
        # ...
        if self.node.tag == "input":
            text = self.node.attributes.get("value", "")
        elif self.node.tag == "button":
            if len(self.node.children) == 1 and \
               isinstance(self.node.children[0], Text):
                text = self.node.children[0].text
            else:
                print("Ignoring HTML contents inside button")
                text = ""
        # ...

Note that <button> elements can in principle contain complex HTML, not just a text node. That’s too complicated for this chapter, so I’m having the browser print a warning and skip the text in that case.There’s an exercise on this. Finally, we draw that text:

class InputLayout:
    def paint(self):
        # ...
        color = self.node.style["color"]
        cmds.append(
            DrawText(self.x, self.y, text, self.font, color))
        return cmds

By this point in the book, you’ve seen many layout objects, so I’m glossing over these changes. The point is that new layout objects are one common way to extend the browser.

We now need to create some InputLayouts, which we can do in BlockLayout:

class BlockLayout:
    def recurse(self, node):
        if isinstance(node, Text):
            # ...
        else:
            if node.tag == "br":
                self.new_line()
            elif node.tag == "input" or node.tag == "button":
                self.input(node)
            else:
                for child in node.children:
                    self.recurse(child)

Finally, this new input method is similar to the text method, creating a new layout object and adding it to the current line:It’s so similar in fact that they only differ in how they compute w. I’ll resist the temptation to refactor this code until we get to Chapter 15.

class BlockLayout:
    def input(self, node):
        w = INPUT_WIDTH_PX
        if self.cursor_x + w > self.width:
            self.new_line()
        line = self.children[-1]
        previous_word = line.children[-1] if line.children else None
        input = InputLayout(node, line, previous_word)
        line.children.append(input)

        weight = node.style["font-weight"]
        style = node.style["font-style"]
        if style == "normal": style = "roman"
        size = int(float(node.style["font-size"][:-2]) * .75)
        font = get_font(size, weight, style)

        self.cursor_x += w + font.measure(" ")

But actually, there are a couple more complications due to the way we decided to resolve the block-mixed-with-inline-siblings problem (see Chapter 5). One is that if there are no children for a node, we assume it’s a block element. But <input> elements don’t have children, yet must have inline layout or else they won’t draw correctly. Likewise, a <button> does have children, but they are treated specially.This situation is specific to these elements in our browser, but only because they are the only elements with special painting behavior within an inline context. These are also two examples of atomic inlines.

We can fix that with this change to layout_mode to add a second condition for returning “inline”:

class BlockLayout:
    def layout_mode(self):
        # ...
        elif self.node.children or self.node.tag == "input":
            return "inline"
        # ...

The second problem is that, again due to having block siblings, sometimes an <input> or <button> element will create a BlockLayout (which will then create an InputLayout inside). In this case we don’t want to paint the background twice, so let’s add some simple logic to skip painting it in BlockLayout in this case, via a new should_paint method:Recall (see Chapter 5) that we only get into this situation due to the presence of anonymous block boxes. Also, it’s worth noting that there are various other ways that our browser does not fully implement all the complexities of inline painting—one example is that it does not correctly paint nested inlines with different background colors. Inline layout and paint are very complicated in real browsers.

class BlockLayout:
    # ...
    def should_paint(self):
        return isinstance(self.node, Text) or \
            (self.node.tag != "input" and self.node.tag !=  "button")

Add a trivial should_paint method that just returns True to all of the other layout object types. Now we can skip painting objects based on should_paint:

def paint_tree(layout_object, display_list):
    if layout_object.should_paint():
        display_list.extend(layout_object.paint())
    # ...

With these changes the browser should now draw input and button elements as blue and orange rectangles.

The reason buttons surround their contents but input areas don’t is that a button can contain images, styled text, or other content. In a real browser, that relies on the inline-block display mode: a way of putting a block element into a line of text. There’s also an older <input type=button> syntax more similar to text inputs.

Interacting with widgets

We’ve got input elements rendering, but you can’t edit their contents yet. But of course that’s the whole point! So let’s make input elements work like the address bar does—clicking on one will clear it and let you type into it.

Clearing is easy, another case inside Tab’s click method:

class Tab:
    def click(self, x, y):
        while elt:
            # ...
            elif elt.tag == "input":
                elt.attributes["value"] = ""
            # ...

However, if you try this, you’ll notice that clicking does not actually clear the input element. That’s because the code above updates the HTML tree—but we need to update the layout tree and then the display list of the change to appear on the screen.

Right now, the layout tree and display list are computed in load, but we don’t want to reload the whole page; we just want to redo the styling, layout, paint and draw phases. Together these are called rendering. So let’s extract these phases into a new Tab method, render:

class Tab:
    def load(self, url, payload=None):
        # ...
        self.render()

    def render(self):
        style(self.nodes, sorted(self.rules, key=cascade_priority))
        self.document = DocumentLayout(self.nodes)
        self.document.layout()
        self.display_list = []
        paint_tree(self.document, self.display_list)

For this code to work, you’ll also need to change nodes and rules from local variables in the load method to new fields on a Tab. Note that styling moved from load to render, but downloading the style sheets didn’t—we don’t re-download the style sheetsActually, some changes to the web page could delete existing link nodes or create new ones. Real browsers respond to this correctly, either removing the rules corresponding to deleted link nodes or downloading new style sheets when new link nodes are created. This is tricky to get right, and typing into an input area definitely can’t make such changes, so let’s skip this in our browser. every time you type!

Now when we click an input element and clear its contents, we can call render to redraw the page with the input cleared:

class Tab:
    def click(self, x, y):
        while elt:
            elif elt.tag == "input":
                elt.attributes["value"] = ""
                return self.render()

So that’s clicking in an input area. But typing is harder. Think back to how we implemented the address bar: we added a focus field that remembered what we clicked on so we could later send it our key presses. We need something like that focus field for input areas, but it’s going to be more complex because the input areas live inside a Tab, not inside the Browser.

Naturally, we will need a focus field on each Tab, to remember which text entry (if any) we’ve recently clicked on:

class Tab:
    def __init__(self):
        # ...
        self.focus = None

Now when we click on an input element, we need to set focus (and clear focus if nothing was found to focus on):

class Tab:
    def click(self, x, y):
        self.focus = None
        # ...
        while elt:
            elif elt.tag == "input":
                self.focus = elt
                # ...

But remember that keyboard input isn’t handled by the Tab—it’s handled by the Browser. So how does the Browser even know when keyboard events should be sent to the Tab? The Browser has to remember that in its own focus field!

In other words, when you click on the web page, the Browser updates its focus field to remember that the user is interacting with the page, not the browser chrome. And if so, it should unfocus (“blur”) the browser chrome:

class Chrome:
    def blur(self):
        self.focus = None
class Browser:
    def handle_click(self, e):
        if e.y < self.chrome.bottom:
            self.focus = None
            # ...
        else:
            self.focus = "content"
            self.chrome.blur()
            # ...
        self.draw()

The if branch that corresponds to clicks in the browser chrome unsets focus, meaning focus is no longer on the page contents, and key presses will thus be sent to the Chrome.

When a key press happens, the Browser sends it either to the address bar or calls the active tab’s keypress method (or neither, if nothing is focused):

class Browser:
    def handle_key(self, e):
        # ...
        if self.chrome.keypress(e.char):
            self.draw()
        elif self.focus == "content":
            self.active_tab.keypress(e.char)
            self.draw()

Here I’ve changed keypress to return true if the browser chrome consumed the key:

class Chrome:
    def keypress(self, char):
        if self.focus == "address bar":
            self.address_bar += char
            return True
        return False

That keypress method then uses the tab’s focus field to put the character in the right text entry:

class Tab:
    def keypress(self, char):
        if self.focus:
            self.focus.attributes["value"] += char
            self.render()

Note that here we call render instead of draw, because we’ve modified the web page and thus need to regenerate the display list instead of just redrawing it to the screen.

Hierarchical focus handling is an important pattern for combining graphical widgets; in a real browser, where web pages can be embedded into one another with iframes,The iframe element allows you to embed one web page into another as a little window. We’ll talk about this more in Chapter 15. the focus tree can be arbitrarily deep.

So now we have user input working with input elements. Before we move on, there is one last tweak that we need to make: drawing the text cursor in the Tab’s render method. This turns out to be harder than expected: the cursor should be drawn by the InputLayout of the focused node, and that means that each node has to know whether or not it’s focused:

class Element:
    def __init__(self, tag, attributes, parent):
        # ...
        self.is_focused = False

Add the same field to Text nodes; they’ll never be focused and never draw cursors, but it’s more convenient if Text and Element have the same fields. We’ll set this when we move focus to an input element:

class Tab:
    def click(self, x, y):
        while elt:
            elif elt.tag == "input":
                elt.attributes["value"] = ""
                if self.focus:
                    self.focus.is_focused = False
                self.focus = elt
                elt.is_focused = True
                return self.render()

Note that we have to un-focusUn-focusing is called “blurring”, which is funny but can sometimes lead to confusion. the currently-focused element, lest it keep drawing its cursor. Anyway, now we can draw a cursor if an input element is focused:

class InputLayout:
    def paint(self):
        # ...
        if self.node.is_focused:
            cx = self.x + self.font.measure(text)
            cmds.append(DrawLine(
                cx, self.y, cx, self.y + self.height, "black", 1))
        # ...

Now you can click on a text entry, type into it, and modify its value. The next step is submitting the now-filled-out form.

This approach to drawing the text cursor—having the InputLayout draw it—allows visual effects to apply to the cursor, as we’ll see in Chapter 11. But not every browser does it this way. Chrome, for example, keeps track of a global focused element to make sure the cursor can be globally styled.

Submitting forms

You submit a form by clicking on a button. So let’s add another condition to the big while loop in click:

class Tab:
    def click(self, x, y):
        while elt:
            # ...
            elif elt.tag == "button":
                # ...
            # ...

Once we’ve found the button, we need to find the form that it’s in, by walking up the HTML tree:

elif elt.tag == "button":
    while elt:
        if elt.tag == "form" and "action" in elt.attributes:
            return self.submit_form(elt)
        elt = elt.parent

The submit_form method is then in charge of finding all of the input elements, encoding them in the right way, and sending the POST request. First, we look through all the descendents of the form to find input elements:

class Tab:
    def submit_form(self, elt):
        inputs = [node for node in tree_to_list(elt, [])
                  if isinstance(node, Element)
                  and node.tag == "input"
                  and "name" in node.attributes]

For each of those input elements, we need to extract the name attribute and the value attribute, and form-encode both of them. Form encoding is how the name/value pairs are formatted in the HTTP POST request. Basically: name, then equal sign, then value; and name-value pairs are separated by ampersands:

class Tab:
    def submit_form(self, elt):
        # ...
        body = ""
        for input in inputs:
            name = input.attributes["name"]
            value = input.attributes.get("value", "")
            body += "&" + name + "=" + value
        body = body[1:]

Here body initially has an extra & tacked on to the front, which is removed on the last line.

Now, any time you see special syntax like this, you’ve got to ask: what if the name or the value has an equal sign or an ampersand in it? So in fact, “percent encoding” replaces all special characters with a percent sign followed by those characters’ hex codes. For example, a space becomes %20 and a period becomes %2e. Python provides a percent-encoding function as quote in the urllib.parse module:You can write your own percent_encode function using Python’s ord and hex functions if you’d like. I’m using the standard function for expediency. Earlier in the book, using these library functions would have obscured key concepts, but by this point percent encoding is necessary but not conceptually interesting.

for input in inputs:
    # ...
    name = urllib.parse.quote(name)
    value = urllib.parse.quote(value)
    # ...

Now that submit_form has built a request body, it needs to make a POST request. I’m going to defer that responsibility to the load function, which handles making requests:

def submit_form(self, elt):
    # ...
    url = self.url.resolve(elt.attributes["action"])
    self.load(url, body)

The new payload argument to load is then passed through to request:

def load(self, url, payload=None):
    # ...
    body = url.request(payload)
    # ...

In request, this new argument is used to decide between a GET and a POST request:

class URL:
    def request(self, payload=None):
        # ...
        method = "POST" if payload else "GET"
        # ...
        request = "{} {} HTTP/1.0\r\n".format(method, self.path)
        # ...

If there it’s a POST request, the Content-Length header is mandatory:

class URL:
    def request(self, payload=None):
        # ...
        if payload:
            length = len(payload.encode("utf8"))
            request += "Content-Length: {}\r\n".format(length)
        # ...

Note that the Content-Length is the length of the payload in bytes, which might not be equal to its length in letters.Because characters from many languages take up multiple bytes. Finally, after the headers, we send the payload itself:

class URL:
    def request(self, payload=None):
        # ...
        if payload: request += payload
        s.send(request.encode("utf8"))
        # ...

So that’s how the POST request gets sent. Then the server responds with an HTML page and the browser will render it in the totally normal way.Actually, because browsers treat going “back” to a POST-requested page specially (see the exercises), it’s common to respond to a POST request with a redirect. That’s basically it for forms!

While most form submissions use the form encoding described here, forms with file uploads (using <input type=file>) use a different encoding that includes metadata for each key-value pair (like the file name or file type). There’s also an obscure text/plain encoding option, which uses no escaping and which even the standard warns against using.

How web apps work

So… How do web applications (a.k.a. web apps) use forms? When you use an application from your browser—whether you are registering to vote, looking at pictures of your baby cousin, or checking your email—there are typicallyHere I’m talking in general terms. There are some browser applications without a server, and others where the client code is exceptionally simple and almost all the code is on the server. two programs involved: client code that runs in the browser, and server code that runs on the server. When you click on things or take actions in the application, that runs client code, which then sends data to the server via HTTP requests.

For example, imagine a simple message board application. The server stores the state of the message board—who has posted what—and has logic for updating that state. But all the actual interaction with the page—drawing the posts, letting the user enter new ones—happens in the browser. Both components are necessary.

The browser and the server interact over HTTP. The browser first makes a GET request to the server to load the current message board. The user interacts with the browser to type a new post, and submits it to the server (say, via a form). That causes the browser to make a POST request to the server, which instructs the server to update the message board state. The server then needs the browser to update what the user sees; with forms, the server sends a new HTML page in its response to the POST request.

Forms are a simple, minimal introduction to this cycle of request and response and make a good introduction to how browser applications work. They’re also implemented in every browser and have been around for decades. These days many web applications use the form elements, but replace synchronous POST requests with asynchronous ones driven by Javascript,In the early 2000s, the adoption of asynchronous HTTP requests sparked the wave of innovative new web applications called Web 2.0. which makes applications snappier by hiding the time to make the HTTP request. In return for that snappiness, that JavaScript code must now handle errors, validate inputs, and indicate loading time. In any case, both synchronous and asynchronous uses of forms are based on the same principles of client and server code.

There are request types besides GET and POST, like PUT (create if nonexistant) and DELETE, or the more obscure CONNECT and TRACE. In 2010 the PATCH method was standardized in RFC 5789. New methods were intended as a standard extension mechanism for HTTP, and some protocols were built this way (like WebDav’s PROPFIND, MOVE, and LOCK methods), but this did not become an enduring way to extend the web itself, and HTTP 2.0 and 3.0 did not add any new methods.

Receiving POST requests

To better understand the request/response cycle, let’s write a simple web server. It’ll implement an online guest book,They were very hip in the 90s—comment threads from before there was anything to comment on. kind of like an open, anonymous comment thread. Now, this is a book on web browser engineering, so I won’t discuss web server implementation that thoroughly. But I want you to see how the server side of an application works.

A web server is a separate program from the web browser, so let’s start a new file. The server will need to:

Let’s start by opening a socket. Like for the browser, we need to create an internet streaming socket using TCP:

import socket
s = socket.socket(
    family=socket.AF_INET,
    type=socket.SOCK_STREAM,
    proto=socket.IPPROTO_TCP)
s.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)

The setsockopt call is optional. Normally, when a program has a socket open and it crashes, your OS prevents that port from being reusedWhen your process crashes, the computer on the end of the connection won’t be informed immediately; if some other process opens the same port, it could receive data meant for the old, now-dead process. for a short period. That’s annoying when developing a server; calling setsockopt with the SO_REUSEADDR option allows the OS to immediately reuse the port.

Now, with this socket, instead of calling connect (to connect to some other server), we’ll call bind, which waits for other computers to connect:

s.bind(('', 8000))
s.listen()

Let’s look at the bind call first. Its first argument says who should be allowed to make connections to the server; the empty string means that anyone can connect. The second argument is the port others must use to talk to our server; I’ve chosen 8000. I can’t use 80, because ports below 1024 require administrator privileges, but you can pick something other than 8000 if, for whatever reason, port 8000 is taken on your machine.

Finally, after the bind call, the listen call tells the OS that we’re ready to accept connections.

To actually accept those connections, we enter a loop that runs once per connection. At the top of the loop we call s.accept to wait for a new connection:

while True:
    conx, addr = s.accept()
    handle_connection(conx)

That connection object is, confusingly, also a socket: it is the socket corresponding to that one connection. We know what to do with those: we read the contents and parse the HTTP message. But it’s a little trickier in the server than in the browser, because the server can’t just read from the socket until the connection closes—the browser is waiting for the server and won’t close the connection.

So we’ve got to read from the socket line-by-line. First, we read the request line:

def handle_connection(conx):
    req = conx.makefile("b")
    reqline = req.readline().decode('utf8')
    method, url, version = reqline.split(" ", 2)
    assert method in ["GET", "POST"]

Then we read the headers until we get to a blank line, accumulating the headers in a dictionary:

def handle_connection(conx):
    # ...
    headers = {}
    while True:
        line = req.readline().decode('utf8')
        if line == '\r\n': break
        header, value = line.split(":", 1)
        headers[header.casefold()] = value.strip()

Finally we read the body, but only when the Content-Length header tells us how much of it to read (that’s why that header is mandatory on POST requests):

def handle_connection(conx):
    # ...
    if 'content-length' in headers:
        length = int(headers['content-length'])
        body = req.read(length).decode('utf8')
    else:
        body = None

Now the server needs to generate a web page in response. We’ll get to that later; for now, just abstract that away behind a do_request call:

def handle_connection(conx):
    # ...
    status, body = do_request(method, url, headers, body)

The server then sends this page back to the browser:

def handle_connection(conx):
    # ...
    response = "HTTP/1.0 {}\r\n".format(status)
    response += "Content-Length: {}\r\n".format(
        len(body.encode("utf8")))
    response += "\r\n" + body
    conx.send(response.encode('utf8'))
    conx.close()

This is all pretty bare-bones: our server doesn’t check that the browser is using HTTP 1.0 to talk to it, it doesn’t send back any headers at all except Content-Length, it doesn’t support TLS, and so on. Again: this is a web browser book—it’ll do.

Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking is an excellent deep dive into networking and how to optimize for it in a web application. There are things the client can do (make fewer requests, avoid polling, reuse connections) and things the server can do (compression, protocol support, sharing domains).

Generating web pages

So far all of this server code is “boilerplate”—any web application will have similar code. What makes our server a guest book, on the other hand, depends on what happens inside do_request. It needs to store the guest book state, generate HTML pages, and respond to POST requests.

Let’s store guest book entries in a Python list. Usually web applications use persistent state, like a database, so that the server can be restarted without losing state, but our guest book need not be that resilient.

ENTRIES = [ 'Pavel was here' ]

Next, do_request has to output HTML that shows those entries:

def do_request(method, url, headers, body):
    out = "<!doctype html>"
    for entry in ENTRIES:
        out += "<p>" + entry + "</p>"
    return "200 OK", out

This is definitely “minimal” HTML, so it’s a good thing our browser will insert implicit tags and has some default styles! You can test it out by running this minimal web server and, while it’s running, direct your browser to http://localhost:8000/, where localhost is what your computer calls itself and 8000 is the port we chose earlier. You should see one guest book entry.

By the way, while you’re debugging this web server, it’s probably better to use a real web browser, instead of this book’s browser, to interact with it. That way you don’t have to worry about browser bugs while you work on server bugs. But this server does support both real and toy browsers.

We’ll use forms to let visitors write in the guest book:

def do_request(method, url, headers, body):
    # ...
    out += "<form action=add method=post>"
    out +=   "<p><input name=guest></p>"
    out +=   "<p><button>Sign the book!</button></p>"
    out += "</form>"
    # ...

When this form is submitted, the browser will send a POST request to http://localhost:8000/add. So the server needs to react to these submissions. That means do_request will field two kinds of requests: regular browsing and form submissions. Let’s separate the two kinds of requests into different functions.

First rename the current do_request to show_comments:

def show_comments():
    # ...
    return out

This then frees up the do_request function to figure out which function to call for which request:

def do_request(method, url, headers, body):
    if method == "GET" and url == "/":
        return "200 OK", show_comments()
    elif method == "POST" and url == "/add":
        params = form_decode(body)
        return "200 OK", add_entry(params)
    else:
        return "404 Not Found", not_found(url, method)

When a POST request to /add comes in, the first step is to decode the request body:

def form_decode(body):
    params = {}
    for field in body.split("&"):
        name, value = field.split("=", 1)
        name = urllib.parse.unquote_plus(name)
        value = urllib.parse.unquote_plus(value)
        params[name] = value
    return params

Note that I use unquote_plus instead of unquote, because browsers may also use a plus sign to encode a space. The add_entry function then looks up the guest parameter and adds its content as a new guest book entry:

def add_entry(params):
    if 'guest' in params:
        ENTRIES.append(params['guest'])
    return show_comments()

I’ve also added a “404” response. Fitting the austere stylings of our guest book, here’s the 404 page:

def not_found(url, method):
    out = "<!doctype html>"
    out += "<h1>{} {} not found!</h1>".format(method, url)
    return out

Try it! You should be able to restart the server, open it in your browser, and update the guest book a few times. You should also be able to use the guest book from a real web browser.

Typically connection handling and request routing is handled by a web framework; this book, for example uses bottle.py. Frameworks parse requests into convenient data structures, route requests to the right handler, and can also provide tools like HTML templates, session handling, database access, input validation, and API generation.

Summary

With this chapter we’re starting to transform our browser into an application platform. We’ve added:

Plus, our browser now has a little web server friend. That’s going to be handy as we add more interactive features to the browser.

Since this chapter introduces a server, I’ve also added support for that in the browser widget below, by cross-compiling this chapter’s server code to JavaScript. Try submitting a comment through the form, it should work!

Close

Outline

The complete set of functions, classes, and methods in our browser should now look something like this:

WIDTH HEIGHT HSTEP VSTEP SCROLL_STEP FONTS def get_font(size, weight, slant) class Text: def __init__(text, parent) def __repr__() class Element: def __init__(tag, attributes, parent) def __repr__() def print_tree(node, indent) class HTMLParser: def __init__(body) def parse() def get_attributes(text) def add_text(text) SELF_CLOSING_TAGS def add_tag(tag) HEAD_TAGS def implicit_tags(tag) def finish() BLOCK_ELEMENTS class DocumentLayout: def __init__(node) def layout() def paint() def __repr__() def should_paint() class CSSParser: def __init__(s) def whitespace() def literal(literal) def word() def pair() def ignore_until(chars) def body() def selector() def parse() class TagSelector: def __init__(tag) def matches(node) def __repr__() class DescendantSelector: def __init__(ancestor, descendant) def matches(node) def __repr__() INHERITED_PROPERTIES def style(node, rules) def cascade_priority(rule) class DrawText: def __init__(x1, y1, text, font, color) def execute(scroll, canvas) def __repr__() class URL: def __init__(url) def request(payload) def resolve(url) def tree_to_list(tree, list) class DrawLine: def __init__(x1, y1, x2, y2, color, thickness) def execute(scroll, canvas) def __repr__() class DrawOutline: def __init__(rect, color, thickness) def execute(scroll, canvas) def __repr__() class BlockLayout: def __init__(node, parent, previous) def token(tok) def word(node, word) def flush() def recurse(node) def open_tag(tag) def close_tag(tag) def layout() def layout_mode() def paint() def __repr__() def new_line() def self_rect() def input(node) def should_paint() class LineLayout: def __init__(node, parent, previous) def layout() def paint() def __repr__() def should_paint() class TextLayout: def __init__(node, word, parent, previous) def layout() def paint() def should_paint() class Tab: def __init__(tab_height) def load(url, payload) def draw(canvas, offset) def scrolldown() def click(x, y) def go_back() def __repr__() def render() def submit_form(elt) def keypress(char) class Browser: def __init__() def handle_down(e) def handle_click(e) def handle_key(e) def handle_enter(e) def new_tab(url) def draw() class Chrome: def __init__(browser) def tab_rect(i) def paint() def click(x, y) def keypress(char) def enter() def blur() class DrawRect: def __init__(rect, color) def execute(scroll, canvas) def __repr__() class Rect: def __init__(left, top, right, bottom) def containsPoint(x, y) browser8 DEFAULT_STYLE_SHEET INPUT_WIDTH_PX class InputLayout: def __init__(node, parent, previous) def layout() def should_paint() def self_rect() def paint() def __repr__() def paint_tree(layout_object, display_list)

There’s also a server now, but it’s much simpler:

def handle_connection(conx) def do_request(method, url, headers, body) def form_decode(body) ENTRIES def show_comments() def not_found(url, method) def add_entry(params)

If you run it, it should look something like this:

Exercises

Enter key: In most browsers, if you hit the “Enter” or “Return” key while inside a text entry, that submits the form that the text entry was in. Add this feature to your browser.

GET forms: Forms can be submitted via GET requests as well as POST requests. In GET requests, the form-encoded data is pasted onto the end of the URL, separated from the path by a question mark, like /search?q=hi; GET form submissions have no body. Implement GET form submissions.

Blurring: Right now, if you click inside a text entry, and then inside the address bar, two cursors will appear on the screen. To fix this, add a blur method to each Tab which unfocuses anything that is focused, and call it before changing focus.

Check boxes: In HTML, input elements have a type attribute. When set to checkbox, the input element looks like a checkbox; it’s checked if the checked attribute is set, and unchecked otherwise.Technically, the checked attribute only affects the state of the checkbox when the page loads; checking and unchecking a checkbox does not affect this attribute but instead manipulates internal state. When the form is submitted, a checkbox’s name=value pair is included only if the checkbox is checked. (If the checkbox has no value attribute, the default is the string on.)

Resubmit requests: One reason to separate GET and POST requests is that GET requests are supposed to be idempotent (read-only, basically) while POST requests are assumed to change the web server state. That means that going “back” to a GET request (making the request again) is safe, while going “back” to a POST request is a bad idea. Change the browser history to record what method was used to access each URL, and the POST body if one was used. When you go back to a POST-ed URL, ask the user if they want to resubmit the form. Don’t go back if they say no; if they say yes, submit a POST request with the same body as before.

Message board: Right now our web server is a simple guest book. Extend it into a simple message board by adding support for topics. Each topic should have its own URL and its own list of messages. So, for example, /cooking should be a page of posts (about cooking) and comments submitted through the form on that page should only show up when you go to /cooking, not when you go to /cars. Make the home page, from /, list the available topics with a link to each topic’s page. Make it possible for users to add new topics.

Persistence: Back the server’s list of guest book entries with a file, so that when the server is restarted it doesn’t lose data.

Rich buttons: Make it possible for a button to contain arbitrary elements as children, and render them correctly. The children should be contained inside button instead of spilling out—this can make a button really tall. Think about edge cases, like a button that contains another button, an input area, or a link, and test real browsers to see what they do.

HTML chrome: Browser chrome is quite complicated in real browsers, with tricky details such as font sizes, padding, outlines, shadows, icons and so on. This makes it tempting to try to reuse our layout engine for it. Implement this, using <button> elements for the new tab and back buttons, an <input> element for the address bar, and <a> elements for the tab names. It won’t look exactly the same as the current chrome—outline will have to wait for Chapter 14, for example—but if you adjust the default CSS you should be able to make it look passable.Real browsers have in fact gone down this implementation path multiple times, building layout engines for the browser chrome that are heavily inspired by or reuse pieces of the main web layout engine. Firefox had one, and Chrome has one. However, because it’s so important for the browser chrome to be very fast and responsive to draw, such approaches have had mixed success.

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