Re: [Evolution-hackers] WebKit port progress update

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan gnome org>]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 17:20 +0200, Dan Vratil wrote:
>> as I already mentioned on the IRC meeting, embedding widgets into WebKit
>> is broken and I was told that WebKit-Gtk developers intend to drop this
>> functionality sooner or later.
>
> Citation needed.  Xan Lopez said he wasn't aware of any problems or
> plans to drop the API when I asked him about this after the IRC meeting,
> and the bug you opened includes a comment with a possible solution:
>
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63451
>
>
>> So I decided to go similar way Anjal
>> does, splitting the email display into multiple webviews. To be able to
>> do so, I also decided to change the way EMFormat works as well.
>
> IIRC, Srini told me told me at the Boston Summit last year that this
> approach for Anjal was fine for display but derailed when it came time
> to print.
>
>
> Maybe Srini can comment further?  (CC'ing him)
>

It isn't simple for printing. But you can work it around by supporting
only the needed file types. In any case see if we can get a top window
cairo handle and print it to a printable surface. It should be much
easier and match what the user sees. If we can do anjal like webkit
rendering, it is very simple to get a conversation view into
evolution. I could pull pieces from anjal and build it for evolution.

[...]
> Don't get me wrong, the design you're proposing sounds sensible _if_ you
> can overcome the printing issue.  I'm just pointing out the known speed
> bumps on this road.
>

This is the most appropriate approach I felt for anjal, since Webkit
then didn't have embedded gtk objects. IIRC newer webkit supports it.
Worth a try to see if it is feasible to consider that. One thing I can
say is that, this will be faster than the earlier method, for reason
that even when we expand one attachment/mail, we rerender the entire
mail and remember their previous states etc which is sort-a ugly. This
approach only deals with the MIME part that you expand/hide and very
simple and fast.

-Srini