: So far as I know, every major reader, the ones from Amazon, Sony and
: Barnes & Noble, all follow hyperlinks just fine (they're used for
: footnotes). And the http protocol works just fine to local files.
Hm. That hasn't been my experience. Which may be more limited than yours.
Also... how does the http protocol work to local files? What does such
a url look like?
http://localhost/a/b/c? Or just http:/a/b/c? Or what?
Something like http:a/b/c is something else again.
Anyways, if it doesn't handle
http://j.random.host.com/a/b/c,
then it isn't a web browser.
FWIW (not much), I normally would access local files via file:///a/b/c;
using http doesn't even guarantee there are "files" involved, as such.
:: Kindles, of course, have a webkit web browser builtin, which is about
:: as much of a browser as gnome epiphany is. Which is to say, "they
:: have a web browser".
: Which is what I said.
NAICT, not the same thing. For one thing, the "webkit" part involves
things like managing bookmarks, filling in forms, and other things just
reading books doesn't.
IME the kindle browser is quite distinct from the kindle ebook reader.
The browser can't render ebooks, and the ebook reader can't dereference
URLs (if they point outside the book, especially to http protocol).
The ebook rendering engine and the webkit web browser are distinct.
So to say any device that has the rendering engine, but without the
capability of dealing with URLs "has a web browser" is at best misleading,
since it can't fetch pages by http protocol. That, both internally and
as parameters at startup, is pretty much required to be a "web browser",
and avoid being misleading about it.
Plus, iirc, if you dereference a link to an http page while you
are reading their blurbs at/after the end of a book, they ask you
if you want to start up the web browser if you happen upon something
that's a full-blown http url. So, again iirc, *they* (the folks who
designed what the kindle does in such cases) seem to think they
are distinct.
Plus too also, if the mobi and/or epub definition states what html
tags they are guaranteed to interpret (which I expect), and it's not
a full-enough set, then being able to read a mobi and/or epub document
isn't enough to imply that there's a web browser involved in it.
Now, I can't address all arbitrary e-book readers. But from the
way the kindle behaves, the two are distinct entities, fair and square.
Hey, everybody's their own Humpty-Dumpty, and your words can mean just
what you choose them to mean, neither more nor less, but functionally,
what you said was not the same as what I said. NAICT, IMO, YMMV, VWP.