Re: The HTML-Info initiative

[Per Bothner]

On 12/27/21 12:39, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 27, 2021 at 09:07:21AM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
> > It seems unaware of and not making use
> > of info.js.  Integration with info.js would be nice - at the very least disable
> > the latter's sidebar and other duplicated functionality.
>
> Another detail of implementation.  For what it's worth I tried this approach
> initially with QtWebEngine and embedding info.js but the special cases that
> needed to be added to the code to support this weren't worth it, in my
> opinion.  Again these decisions would have to be made by whoever is doing
> the work to make the program work.  Programs with embedded web browsers have
> an awkward structure to work with as you are no doubt aware from your work
> with DomTerm.

Of course if someone wants to work on improving and maintaining webkitgtk-info 
that
is their choice.  But from the point of view of the texinfo project having
limited resources, I think it makes more sense for webkitgtk-info to be just a
thin wrapper running info.js in a webkitgtk window.  We want the web interface
to be pleasant to use, and I think we agree info.js both looks nice and works 
about
as well as stand-alone info when browsing/navigating a single manual.  Where a
local reader can be helpful (beyond not depending on the internet) is in things
like knowing where in the filesystem to look for manuals, cross-manual browsing,
and search. And of course quickly bringing up a window with an embedded browser.

But whether to write webkitgtk-info as a "pure C" application or as a hybrid
"C/JavaScript" application using info.js is up to whoever does the work, of 
course.

Another possibility:

While DomTerm supports multiple desktop browsers as well as embedded browsers
(including Electron on Qt), lately I've been experiementing with using the
Wry framework: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry which is part of the larger 
Tauri project.
Wry is cross-platform, and is officially supported on GNU/Linux, Windows, and 
MacOS.
On GNU/Linux it makes use of WebKitGtk.  It seems well-thought-out, with 
responsive
maintainers, and a number of nice features,
Wry is a Rust "crate", which has both advantages and disadvantages.
(For me, having to learn Rust is both an advantage and a disadvantage!)

I have "dt-wry" working as one of the DomTerm front-ends, but it also works 
great
for running info.js.

The older webview project (https://github.com/webview/webview) is similar to Wry
(in terms of being an embeddable wrapper over a "system" browser component).
It works for C/C++ - but alas it seems to have becomes dormant (again).
--
        --Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/