Re: Question about html widget.

[Raphael Bosshard <whistler bluewin ch>]

Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:

> 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.
I don't know if gecko is really faster than khtml, but that doesn't 
matter anyway. Both, gecko and khtml would make a fine replacement for 
gtkhtml/gtkhtml2. I don't see any sense in developing/maintaining yet 
another html renderer, wasted effort IMO.

I'd like to have a stable and complete html widget in gnome/gtk in a 
forseeable future, rather than have to wait until the gtkhtml/gtkhtml2 
situation is resolved.

The epiphany guys would also be happy, I guess.

Raphael