Re: SimpleWebKit (was GNUstep Web browser (was Re: WebKit Bounty))

[Peter Cooper]

[resend]

Hello

The current progress in SimpleWebKit is very gratifying, I did a test 
build of the code from a  few days ago and the code compiled on 
GNUstep (with only one slight change to an #ifdef), and a simple 
palette seemed quite buildable (although in that version of the code 
there was no content rendering).

> Ok, that brings up a different aspect - maintaining an own web browser
> is a duplicate of work. And that is a completey different topic/
> decision.

I agree, web browser application development is a bit out of scope 
here. I'm not sure it fits into the GNUstep-as-library, or  
GNUstep-as-dev-env philosophy at all, but it probably works for the 
GNUstep-as-desktop-env people. I'd imagine Etoile is more interested 
in a disarticulated, embeddable-everywhere object ;-)

> 1. SimpleWebKit as part of mySTEP is here and shows that it works.
> 2. And I will continue to work on it since I have reasons to do so.
> 3. The offer to the GNUstep community to adopt it for a GNUstep web
> browser it is here.
> 4. But the GNUstep community must decide if they want to follow this
> path and integrate it or not.

I would very much like SimpleWebKit to be included as a framework into 
the GNUstep-gui or dev-libs collections. As a number of people have 
mentioned, even a purely standards-compliant(!) (X)HTML renderer has 
significant practical uses for many existing and future tools and 
applications, especially where the application has some control over 
it's source HTML.

As Nikolaus says, it *is* possible to have a broadly-working framework 
for virtually all web content if enough effort is applied. The amount 
of effort to get there is - unfortunately - likely to be very high. 
For that reason, agreeing with Richard here, it'd be prudent to ensure 
that SimpleWebKit could be easily swapped-out and replaced at runtime 
by a future port of WebKit (with all those tens of people at Apple, 
webkit.org and the KHTML crowd chasing compatibility with awful markup 
for us), and although this can be left for a later date it'd be smart 
to think about *how* to do this easily fairly soon.

> The question remains to me why we should write a (new?) basic xhtml
> view when we can have a full (x)html view - to avoid duplication.

At this rate, we'll have running code (thanks for the screenshot by 
the way!) available for integration soon.

The previously-attempted port of WebKit has stalled and any new port 
is (as far as I know, currently) vapourware. Choosing between 
something available and vapourware is easy I think: there is no actual 
duplication right now!

The benefits of the future port of WebKit (all-of-web functionality, 
extremely bullet-proof and widely tested code, devteam numbering in 
the tens of people) are not significantly diminished by having 
SimpleWebKit in the tree. I still need the all-of-web functionality, 
for example, as do others! Are any more people into helping with the 
bounty?

Integrating SimpleWebKit into our tree is quite beneficial because it 
makes some functionality available that we need (source code and Nib 
compatibility with OSX, basic (X)HTML functionality), it is available 
(Nikolaus is building it for his project), it is suitable for 
limited-resource platforms, and there are other added social bonuses 
in that we can add a little more development effort by enhancing and 
testing SimpleWebKit which can be shared back to QuantumStep if 
Nikolaus wishes.

In summary, I'd like SimpleWebKit added, and when it's in svn, perhaps 
more people can help out.

I'd be interested in helping with the CSS components once I understand 
a little more Nikolaus' approach to rendering.

Peter