Toward Web-based UI technologies. WAS :Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Alexandre Mazari <scaroo gmail com>]

Jim Gettys :
 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.

Clearly, Web UI technologies offers a commodized and lean dev experience and a dynamics, rich user exeperience with the recent advents of HTML5/CSS3.

Following are anti-usecase coming to my mind :)

As an app developer, Why would I define my UI programatically or with a custom XML dialect when I can use a good editor from the dozen of them and my previous web experience (with its flatter learning curve) ?
As an app developer, why would I override a GObject/GtkWidget for my custom needs when I just want the test entry to slide out, when I can use the TONS of hight level components (JQuery, EXT....) ?
As an app developer, why would I have to launch gdb to debug my UI when I could use a webinspector/Firebug dynamically ?
As a theme designer, Why would I fiddle with theme engines, themes or even cropped CSS (as in libcrocro) of recent propositions when I could use full blown CSS to theme system or application-wide ?
As a GTK maintainer, Why would I reimplement a fullblown canvas, offscreen stuffs,layouting, animation framework or a theme engine host, when a Webkit webview do that for free ?

I gave a try at bridging the gap between the GObject word and Web view technologies in the following patch + demo, might be of use.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612590

-- 
Alexandre Mazari