Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of Epiphany

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 15:21 +0200, Christian Persch wrote:
>   Furthermore, we will choose only one web engine back-end to support
> and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to
> multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all
> back-ends support.
> 
>   This single back-end will be * WebKit *.

Hi Christian,

As a Yelp developer, I'm very excited about what WebKit
can bring to our desktop.  It's delivering on what I'd
hoped Gecko would bring us years ago: a rock-solid and
simple API for HTML and web-enabled applications.  Using
Gecko has always felt like surgically extracting pieces
of another application, rather than using a well-designed
library.

In time, I hope we can see WebKit/GTK+ move into the
desktop, and then the platform.  We've been desperately
needing this for years.

*But* I'm concerned about accessibility.  A long time
ago, Yelp switched to Gecko from gtkhtml2.  Back then,
there were all sorts of accessibility problems with
Gecko.  Now those issues have been largely resolved,
and I'm hesitant about anything that might introduce
accessibility regressions again.

Willie Walker talked about this a bit recently on d-d-l:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-February/msg00213.html

And for ARIA, David Bolter pointed out the WebKit bug:

http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12132

ARIA is a fairly new thing that's designed to make
rich Internet applications accessible.  I'm curious
how well WebKit interacts with our accessibility
tools for good old fashioned HTML.  Does it talk
to ATK?  Can a screen reader read a simple page
in Epiphany+WebKit?

--
Shaun