Other things we need for GNOME 2.9

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>]

   DrMike raised a number of very important points in his last message
(which this is my third reply to, just to keep the different topics on
different mails), and I want to comment on those, as they are crucial
to make GNOME easier for users, and they are very important to get
GNOME in shape for competing with Windows/Mac systems.

* On the Window Manager

Jay Painter's window manager source code looks pretty good to me, and
I hear lots of good things about sawmill, but it will certainly take
some work to integrate our tools as well as possible.

Thanks to the WM-list team and the new spec to which Matthias has
contributed a large portion, we have a good chance of getting a decent
WM spec for everyone (we and KDE) to use.

* The HTML engine

This is a though problem.  We have various directions we can take
here: 

      1. Hope Mozilla is finished on time and is usable and
         reasonable (Bonobizing it has been done one time already and
         can be Bonobized in about 5 hours according to Nat).

      2. Finish the new XmHTML port to Gtk, it is on the CVS.  If
         someone wants to look at this they are more than welcome.

      3. Write a new engine using the new gnome toys we have (canvas,
         libart, gdome, css code from gill, gnome-vfs).

I personally would like to discuss a plan that goes like this:

      1. Write Bonobo component and interface for a generic HTML
         rendering engine.

      2. Wrap the current XmHTML on it, and possibly finish the new
         XmHTML and wrap it around this.

      3. When Mozilla is done/finished/released/usable we wrap this
         one too. 

* The Help browser

Given the Bonobo wrapper for an HTML engine, write a help browser
that renders into HTML the documents we have.

Include on it:

	1. Index for commonly used things.
		 * info
		 * man
		 * Docbook pages

        2. Search function.

	3. Link to gTrouble troubleshooting system.

	4. History, favorites

	5. Provide a way to "mark" parts of the documents displayed,
           to underline pieces of text (TkMan did this ages ago).

        6. Provide support for annotating texts (TkMan did this ages
           ago, back on my SunOS 4.x machine).

If we can move toward using the XML-based Docbook setup, we could
even parse SGML files directly, without having to go trouch the jade
process.  This would put us in par with Solaris man pages (which are
fully Docbook based these days). 

Opinions, comments?
Miguel.