Re: PROPOSAL: Evolution for GNOME 2.6

[Shahms King <shahms shahms com>]

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 15:08, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 10:11, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> > I think the way to go here would be to move Yelp to Gecko, drop gtkhtml2
> > and use gtkhtml for Evolution. In the long run, would it be possible to
> > move Evolution to Gecko? Then we could depricate both gtkhtml and
> > gtkhtml2.
> 
> I think using Gecko for the mail display would be a viable solution for
> the long term (although, we need to be able to embed GTK+ widgets into
> the HTML and I don't know how easy/viable that is).
> 
> On the other hand, we still need the GtkHTML editor and as far as I know
> there is no easy way to embed the Mozilla composer...
> 
> -- Ettore

Yeah, embedding the editor (Composer) is currently "Very Difficult If
Not Impossible" according to
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/editor-embedding.html

Fortunately, that page was recently modified (end of October 2003) and
it appears that the Mozilla folks are actively looking at addressing the
issue. I doubt it will be done in the GNOME 2.6 timeframe, however. 

I don't know enough about Mozilla/XUL/XBL to know how difficult/easy it
would be to embed arbitrary Gtk+ widgets in mozilla.  Although, I'm sure
it could be done with some <object>/plugin/bonobo hackery (yuck).

It's long been on my "user-wishlist" to get rid of one or the other of
GtkHTML2 or GtkHTML (or both) in favor of Gecko (well, kind of, I've
always liked the GtkHTML2 code myself, but having 3 HTML libs in the
platform is bordering on ridiculous).  Having mozilla in the
desktop/developer platform creates a lot more duplication than just the
HTML renderer, however.  Off the top of my head it means we have 2 of:

      * XML library (libxml2)
      * XSLT library (libxslt) -- not sure if this is in the platform or
        not
      * CSS parser (libcroco) -- current librsvg depends on it
      * "VFS layer" (gnome-vfs) -- 'necko' I believe it's called, it has
        pluggable backends, though I'm not sure how comparable it really
        is to gnome-vfs it does serve a similar function
      * XML UI definition language (xul --> glade) -- "libgxul" might be
        an interesting project (basically libglade over XUl, haven't
        looked at XUL in a long time, don't know if it's even possible)

Sadly, I don't see any of that duplication going away any time soon
because Mozilla has a strong aversion to using outside code (whether the
merits of this approach to platform independence outweigh the costs is
open for debate ;-)) and, despite being "highly modular," is organized
in such a way as to make using the individual pieces outside of the
framework difficult.

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-- 
Shahms King <shahms shahms com>