This is one of those things where if you have to ask it's probably beyond you.
I'd start by first writing code to download a file via http, you can find the code for that easily enough, just standard socket stuff but you'll need to understand the http protocol but that's trivial too.
Next you'll need an html parser that turns that htttp into a document object model (DOM). You could probably have a decent stab at that but you'd have to go over the html RFC to make sure you're doing it properly and that's a couple of thousand pages of standards. But you could probably get away with the common-sense basics anyway but you'll need to cater for invalid and improperly formatted html too, especially if you are practising on real websites, but if I was you I'd start with rendering my own html so you know it is simple and well-formed.
Now you have your html into a DOM you can traverse that DOM to find other resources that need to be loaded such as images, css files, js files and so on. Again if I was you I'd start with ignoring css files and stick to plain basic html. At this point it is a case of interpreting the DOM you have in a visual manner.
When it comes to supporting links you'll also need to maintain cookies, again looking at the RFCs to make sure you're doing it properly so that will involve writing what is called a cookie container.
If you're planning on supporting actual web pages you'll need a CSS parser and you'll need to interpret and apply that CSS too so it's back to more thousand page RFCs.
Now let's talk javascript, you'll need to write a javascript parser and interpreter apply it.
That'll probably take you a few years to get to a somewhat reasonable state so now let's turn to your original intentions. If you want to stop annoying things like ads, ads are just javascript so how do you know what it "proper" javascript and what script is there for adverts, pop-ups etc? That's what pop-up and ad blockers do, they focus on that single problem and it normally runs off of maintained lists of what domains etc ads are served from, or an interpretation of what the js is doing.
If this is just a C learning exercise then fair enough, but if you want something useful you're probably better looking at writing a browser add-in that attempts to rectify some of the things you find annoying about web browsing, ie another ad blocker. That would be a far more manageable a task.
24 Apr 2017, 4:53 pm
), but the previous poster gave me this idea. Why not write code for an existing minimal browser project?
