Re: gtkhtml2 vs. gtkhtml1

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 14:23, Ali Akcaagac wrote:

> <rant>
> isn't it amusing to see how much ximian employees tactically hide well
> choosen sentences into their replies for not sounding offending etc. but
> still saying that they like gtkhtml1 seeing in favor of gtkhtml2.

It's not a matter of wanting one to "win" over the other.  It's
perfectly okay in my mind to have both gtkhtml1 and gtkhtml2 on my
system.

The bottom line is that it took us two years (in time) to get editing to
work as well as it does for Evolution.  And, we had as many as three
developers working on it.  So we're talking several man-years of effort
here.

In my mind, it just plain doesn't make sense to try to add editing to
gtkhtml2 when it works fine in gtkhtml1.  I suspect, from what I know
about gtkhtml1, that it would be easier to add CSS and accessibility
(although not on top of an internal DOM) to gtkhtml1 than it would to
add editing to gtkhtml2.  Even a simple observation of the time it took
to implement each tells me that.

I think, moreover, that it's foolish to think that any of the Ximian
employees here speak on behalf of Ximian's official policy, unless they
say so.  I certainly don't.

These quotes are all out of context, and I think you're confusing your
pronouns, but I'll try to reply to them anyway.

> quote:
> - 'when WE go and implement css into gtkhtml1'

I suspect it doesn't much matter whether "we" is the GNOME project or
Ximian, but if it's worthwhile to add CSS to gtkhtml1, then there's no
real reason not to.  Ximian must have an editable HTML widget for
Evolution.  gtkhtml1 ported to gnome 2 makes the most sense for that,
since we don't have the time or resources to reimplement it in gtkhtml2.

> - 'if WE decide not to continue development on it (gtkhtml2)'

I suspect whoever said this was speaking of the GNOME project.  Ximian
hasn't ever contributed to gtkhtml2, and certainly has no power to "shut
it down" (in as much as anyone can shut down a free software project)

> - 'gtkhtml2 has a number of issues, as previously discussed'

I think everyone with the requisite technical knowledge has agreed to
that.

Moving on...

> - i personally like to see gtkhtml2 staying alive in favor of gtkhtml1.

I don't much care which widget lives on.  Ideally we would have a single
widget which met the needs of everything out there, but certainly at
this point in time we can't ditch either.  Evolution has requirements
that gtkhtml2 doesn't meet, and Yelp (and other apps) have requirements
that gtkhtml1 doesn't meet.

> - i would like to see gtkhtml2 beeing developed on and mature as khtml.

I would too, but even the *original* gtkhtml2 authors aren't hacking on
it!  The only contributions lately have been accessibility work by Sun
and Wipro and the occassional bug fix.

> - i don't care if it has editor capabilities or not since i am
>   interested in it's rendering interface only.

Well, then you're completely ignoring a huge requirement that a set of
apps need from an HTML widget.  Just because *you* don't need it doesn't
mean that it isn't a requirement.

How do you reconcile this problem?  How do you propose that Evolution
users write an email?  Okay, okay, you might argue that no one should
send HTML mail, but then consider a WYSIWYG web page editor like
Bluefish?  (I don't know if it actually uses gtkhtml1, but it's just an
example)

Joe