Sounds like a great idea.
I've used
WebOne in the past as an HTTPS proxy, had it running on my Pi 4
(it's a .NET program, so it should run fine on most things
). It doesn't do everything you're interested in
(in particular, it doesn't handle JS
), but it does convert images to formats an HPC can read.
You might be able to combine or replace it with
WRP, which basically renders the page in a modern browser on your home server and turns it into a clickable imagemap for your device, but I haven't tried it, least of all with an HPC. I think they support imagemaps though, I was browsing some older websites I'd found on wiby and I'm pretty sure I'd seen a few sites use 'em.
A custom solution might still end up being better, none of these options seem to be tailored at all for CE at all.
GIF has been way, way, way faster to decode than JPG on my HPC devices, even if you'd still have to take the color hit.
One other thing that'd be important is memory -- I've had pages that basically never finished loading with WebOne because of how big they were, even though they were like 90% text. You might want to look into being able to split pages up. Newer HPCs would be better off than the device I can actually hook up to the internet
(an LG Phenom H-120F since I don't have the serial cable for my Jornada 680 or a way to use the modem
).
Also, as an aside, doesn't it feel kinda goofy how much comparatively powerful hardware you end up needing to get an old device to be useful on the internet?
I'd had my full on gaming desktop running Windows 2000 in a VM with Mochasoft PPP so I could connect to the internet over serial on the Phenom, and I'd probably still want power like that if I used WRP since that runs a full copy of Chrome. Kinda also wonder if there's a different way other than using Mochasoft to get a serial internet connection that a CE device would like...
