Re: Question about html widget.

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

About a year or so back, I proposed that a decent solution might be to
port KHTML (the KDE HTML widget) to GTK+. My reasons for this were:

1. It's fast and lightweight.
2. It has support for native widgets, DOM and CSS
3. It supports editing (since KMail uses it)
4. People have already done it so it should not be too hard to do (At
that time AtheOS had done it. Much later, Apple announced that they have
done it as well).

However, this was shouted down maily because people felt that:

1. Too much effort was involved, effort better spent in improving the
existing widgets
2. It was not as good as mozilla and we should all be using Mozilla
anyway.
3. It had a K in it ? ;-)

However, currently (using CVS Mozilla) Mozilla has come far enough so
that:

1. It is faster than Gtkhtml1, gtkhtml2 and khtml
2. It is not that heavyweight (at least, on modern machines)
3. It supports CSS, DOM, etc. pretty well.
4. It supports editing (though the interface is not yet frozen and there
are some known limitations AFAIK)
5. It supports native look and feel (not yet in form widgets sadly, but
that IMO is not that important)
6. The "huge dependency" bit will go away when they release the GRE (I
think it is expected to be within 2M compressed)
7. The API is quite stable (at least, if you use GtkMozEmbed and don't
try anything too fancy)
8. The GTK2 version is very stable and supports all features of the GTk1
version (thgouh it is probably a bit slow)

So, given the situation, I personally feel that we should push towards
using Mozilla for all our HTML rendering/editing needs in the near
future.

On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 15:39, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> tor 2003-03-13 klockan 10.35 skrev Bastien Nocera:
> > On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 05:15, James Henstridge wrote:
> 
> > > Unless you compile devhelp to use GtkMozEmbed ...
> >
> > Unless you compile yelp to use gtkhtml-3.0 ;)
> 
> /me hides :)
> 
> Seriously, the HTML widget situation in GNOME is a mess.
> 
> Basically what we have is:
> 
> Gtkhtml (which is named gtkhtml-3.0 in GNOME2):
> + Editing (needed by Evolution)
> + Fast
> - Doesn't support CSS
> - Doesn't build a DOM tree
> 
> Gtkhtml2:
> + CSS
> + DOM tree
> - Buggy
> - Unmaintained (Padraig is fixing bugs but I don't think he does any
>                 development on it, is that correct Padraig?)
> 
> Gecko:
> + Support pretty much everything
> - Doesn't support native widgets for everything (like scrollbars)
> - Makes a huge dependency with depending on Mozilla
> 
> The reason I use what I use in Yelp and Devhelp is:
> 
> Yelp needs to be accessable and therefor needs CSS and DOM, it also
> needs to use the theme settings for background color, fonts and other
> style settings. Therefor only Gtkhtml2 currently live up to that.
> 
> In Devhelp I use Gtkhtml2 pretty much since I used it in Yelp. However
> Gtkhtml2 shows several bugs when used in Devhelp that isn't noticable in
> Yelp so I added Gecko as an optional support to be able to use that
> myself. According to Richard there are some extra startup time when you
> run with Gecko, nothing I've noticed though.
> 
> Regards and hope it helpts,
>   Micke
> 
> --
> Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
> CodeFactory AB                  http://www.codefactory.se/
>                                 Cell: +46 (0)709 718 918
> 
-- 
Rgds,
Biswa.