Hi, Andre. For your RSS reader, you're only displaying the RSS items
themselves, not browsing to arbitrary other Web pages within the same
Racket window, right?
For very plain HTML, one thing I would hesitate to use is the *very old*
and *possibly insecure* GUI thing, but it might work for your purpose
(be sure to sanitize any untrusted input HTML):
https://docs.racket-lang.org/browser/index.html
You might be better off using one of the heavier text components of the
Racket GUI library (maybe
"
https://docs.racket-lang.org/framework/Editor.html", unless it's
overkill?). This isn't an HTML/CSS/JS/DOM engine, but I'd think you
could do an RSS item or feed view in it.
Another option, and maybe often the usual way, is to use the user's own
Web browser (or a standalone one you provide), and you only provide the
HTTPS server.
A final option, which could be a ton of work to support cross-platform,
but might be viable if you're targeting a single platform and willing to
support it, is to do FFI with one of the big off-the-shelf Web browser
engines, like WebKit (such as through WebKitGtk). There's recent work
on Guile bindings for something like that, but Racket has a lot of other
stuff that Guile doesn't yet have.
Separately, for navigating from an RSS reader running as a Racket GUI
program, to view arbitrary Web pages in the user's main Web browser,
see:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/browser/index.html#(mod-path._browser%2Fexternal)
(I'm pleasantly surprised that people are still interested in Web
"syndication", despite some browsers and various commercial forces
moving away from that, for various reasons. If you're making a
general-purpose RSS reader, an additional protocol to consider also
supporting is "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)". If
you later want to be even more general-purpose, look at how
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus" used the power of a Lisp to provide
a sophisticated unified view from various messaging/syndication/etc.
formats, including from Web-scraping. In addition to threading
features, it also had powerful scoring/ranking interfaces (both crafted
rulesets and ad hoc). Early research in automated collaborative
filtering (what today we know as things like likes/upvotes, and perhaps
recommendation systems) was also done atop Gnus. I'd say Gnus is
probably still more powerful than any UI we're using today to access the
same or analogous kinds of data sources, and it works on behalf of the
user. I don't know how much Gnu is developed lately, but it's worth
looking at for ideas of what you can build, even better.)