Rendering sanity check

[tobimensch]

Unfortunately sometimes pages get rendered wrongly by browsh's webext.

To the human eye this is obvious with missing text or distorted graphics.

Browsh should try to perform a sanity check on the rendered output.

Red flags are:

• No text, or very little text especially on websites with a lot of text nodes. If there's text in the source one can assume it is supposed to be rendered somewhere.
• Instead of boxes/rectangles being in straight lines, they are distorted. It's probably not easy to implement an efficient, reliable algorithm for this check though. For example instead of this:

  |  b  |
  |  o  |
  |  x  |

you get:

|  b  |
  |   o  |
    |   x  |

• Very little text with a huge variety in character coloring instead of the more expected regular colors(usually black) for text. I've experienced this a few times.

If the sanity check fails, Browsh should not send anything to the client and instead try to rerender the page until it succeeds. If rerending fails n times, it should rather send a failure page/report to the client instead of corrupted renders.

It's better to prevent corrupted renders in the first place by fixing browsh's rendering mechanism. However I'm assuming this will not always be possible and therefore a sanity check would save the user's time and bandwith.

[tombh]

Can you give URLs for the examples poorly rendered text?

The only problem here that I know is solved be a page reload is the 'no text' one. So yes I agree that automatically detecting this and reloading would be a good solution, but I think the time spent coding that would be better spent on fixing the actual bug.

[polyzium]

Can confirm. @tombh https://polprog.net/ ELinks: Browsh: