README::Mechanoid 

* History *

	Mechanoid is a fork of John J. Lee's mechanize.  I began by taking
	John's mechanize, pullparser, ClientForm, and ClientCookie packages,
	plonking them all together, and calling it mechanoid, and feeding it
	to Emacs. I did this because mechanize wouldn't follow the first
	relative link I sent it to or do local webs, etc.

    At this point, the module has been shaped into reasonably independent
	subpackages of Python modules where most files contain a single
	class and all code is contained in classes. Every time I work with
	this, I learn a lot from John and the other programmers that are
	listed in the source header-comments.  Note that all the researched
	comments about the RFCs were done by John.

* Usage Notes *

    Installation is described in the INSTALL file.

    The only objects that matter are the Browser in mechanoid.py and the
    HTMLForm instances returned by Browser.forms().  Run pydoc on
    mechanoid.py or enter >>> help("mechanoid") to see the doc strings.
    That file contains the Browser.  The use of the form code is found
    by running pydoc on clientform/HTMLForm.py.

    Hackers of mechanoid might need the prefork.src package.  John's
    notes in the current code are marked "jjl::" and mine are marked
    "rh::".  Problem areas are marked (by both of us) "XXX".  If you are
    on Python 2.2 or less, you must use mechanoid_retro which is the
    last version with John's backwards compatability.  These two
    packages may still be hanging around on my abandoned SourceForge
    mechanoid project.

* Anti-Corporate Note *

	I pulled mechanoid off of SourceForge and freshmeat because both of
	those corporations have attacked my software in ways which an
	individual would never stoop to.  Mechanoid has also been targeted
	by mail.yahoo.com.  All of which seems silly to me.  It's just a
	browser, okay?

	With corporations, it's the money thing.  SourceForge mistakenly
	believed I was using them commercially and deleted two projects
	without mentioning it to me before, during, or after.  In the end,
	they apologized and said I could come back, which I don't think I
	should.  The others, I believe, feel that mechanoid somehow
	threatens their ad-revenues, as if those few of us using mechanoid
	would read the ads anyway.  We're in console mode, okay?

* Short List *

	Update ClientCookies to 1.1
	Update ClientForm to 0.2.1 and refactor
	Fully utilize the CookieJar
	Pull and parse compressed pages
    Fold in SpiderMonkey

* Pending Issues *

	Could use a javascript-sensitive link parser

	mechanoid
		getattr() only cares about self.form
		setting of handlers
	handlers
		why order when all have order 500 ?
	mimewriter
		replace with new Python email module OR
		  make independent of deprecated mimetools

* Author *

	Richard Harris
	richardharris@operamail.com 
	http://python.org/pypi/mechanoid
