The first stable release of the Offpunk console browser has been published, which, in addition to opening Web pages, supports work using the Gemini, Gopher and Spartan protocols, as well as reading news feeds in RSS and Atom formats. The program is written in Python and distributed under the BSD license.
A key feature of Offpunk is the focus on viewing content offline. The browser allows you to subscribe to pages or mark them for further viewing, after which the page data is automatically cached and updated if necessary. Thus, with the help of Offpunk, you can maintain copies of sites and pages that are always available for local viewing and are kept up to date by performing periodic data synchronization. Synchronization options are configured by the user, for example, some content can be synchronized once a day, and some once a month.
Management is carried out through a system of commands and keyboard shortcuts. There is a flexible system for maintaining multi-level bookmarks, subscriptions and archived content. For different MIME types, you can connect your own handlers. Parsing and displaying HTML pages is carried out using the BeautifulSoup4 and Readability libraries. Images can be converted to ASCII graphics using the chafa library.
To automate the execution of actions, an RC file is used that defines the sequence of commands at startup. For example, through an RC file, you can automatically open the home page or download the contents of some sites for later viewing offline. The downloaded content is stored in the ~/.cache/offpunk/ directory as a hierarchy of .gmi and .html files, which allows you to modify the content, manually clean it up, or view the pages in other programs if necessary.
The project continues the development of Gemini and Gopher clients AV-98 and VF-1, created by the author of the Gemini protocol. The Gemini protocol is much simpler than the protocols used on the Web, but more functional than Gopher. The network part of Gemini resembles a heavily simplified HTTP over TLS (traffic is always encrypted), and the page markup is closer to Markdown than to HTML. The protocol is suitable for creating compact and lightweight hypertext sites, devoid of the complications inherent in the modern Web. The Spartan protocol is designed to transfer documents in the Gemini format, but differs in the organization of network interaction (does not use TLS) and extends the capabilities of Gemini with means for exchanging binary files and supports sending data to the server.
Source: opennet.ru