Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 08:46 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" have 
>     made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive 
>     with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the 
>     Windows and Mac equivalents.
> 
> If everything gets done inside or through your browser, it would make
> toolkits such as GTK and desktop environments such as GNOME obsolete,
> except as platforms for a browser.

Agreed. But that is besides the point. If you read "browser" as web
rendering engine, it is not that different to what GTK+ is if you have
all the code, and media that is used locally, as part of your
application.

Think Gwibber here, or devhelp. Both of them are not going out for
remote content - they are just using the web rendering engine as one of
their toolkits, to render the part of their UI that needs more
flexibility, and where it makes sense to use a browser.

Applying a browser engine to all kinds of problems does not mean we are
supporting transferring all our applications to the "cloud". I for one,
am not. So, we should think about 'Gecko', and 'WebKitGTK+' here, not
about Firefox, and Epiphany only.

See you,

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>
GNOME Project