Re: gtkhtml2 vs. gtkhtml1

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 13:21, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 
> 
> tis 2002-09-17 klockan 08.19 skrev Biswapesh Chattopadhyay:
> 
> > 2) To render help pages and show HTML mail, we do not need:
> >     a) Full HTML 4.0.1
> >     b) Full CSS1/2 support
> >     c) Full DOM1/2 support
> >     d) Full JS1.5 support
> 
> We *do* want both CSS and DOM for the help stuff (at least).

yes, but KHTML does have these. I meant *full* support is not required
(and will lead to bloat)

> 
> > 5) Porting effort for KHTML might be less than the waiting effort for
> > Mozilla API to stabilize and be ported to GTK2 (as the default widget
> > set). As I understand it, there is not much chance of that happening
> > before GTK2.2 at least.
> 
> I fail to see the point in porting KHTML when we have both GtkHTML1 and
> GtkHTML2, OK they might not do everything just as well as KHTML but they
> are both pretty good.
> 
> Does KHTML have CSS, DOM and editing (all three of which we do need).

I'm sure about CSS and DOM (after all, Konqueror uses KHTML to render
almost all pages pretty accurately - including DHTML - and passes 90% of
the CSS1 test suite).

> 
> > 6) KHTML is actually pretty good - it's clean (and has a relatively
> > small codebase) and the rendering is good enough - at least much better
> > than GTKHTML 1 or 2. It has decent CSS and JS support and it uses native
> > widgets - what more do you need for
> > Evolution/Yelp/MrProject/Bluefish/Nautilus HTML view ?
> 
> Does KHTML have CSS, DOM and editing (all three of which we do need).

As I said above, it has CSS and DOM. I'm not sure about editing but I'll
try and find out.

> 
> The problem is that we don't have anyone interested in hacking on these
> projects. If we had that person GtkHTML would probably render just as
> good as KHTML.

Yes, but it is ultimately a matter of effort required - isn't it ? The
KDE guys have done a lot of performance tweaks, etc which we will
benifit from if we do a port. Always better to reuse than to develop
from scratch.

But talk is cheap. I'll have a better look at the KHTML code and see how
much effort is really required. It might, of course, be simpler to add
the required features to GTKHTML.

BTW, when you say you want DOM, are you looking at manipulation using
direct calls or a JS interface (i.e. DHTML ?) If you need the latter,
we'll have to have a JS engine also. libmozjs.so (The Mozilla JavaScript
engine) can be used I suppose (Brenden has a pretty good embedding
tutorial at http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/apidoc/jsguide.html).
If you're OK with direct calls, KHTML has a prettygood DOM interface
(http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/cvs-api/classref/khtml/index.html). But then, if you really need to make full use of all these features, you're probably better off simply using Gecko (Editing might be a bit problematic though).

Rgds,
Biswa.


> 
> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal
> 
> --
> Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
> CodeFactory AB                  http://www.codefactory.se/
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