Re: gtkhtml2 vs. gtkhtml1

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

tis 2002-09-17 klockan 23.17 skrev Joe Shaw:

> 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.

I've tried to get this questions answered a couple of times but never
really have. *What* was it that took 2 years for three persons? I find
it very hard to believe that it was only editing, from what I understand
gtkhtml1 was in a pretty pre-mature and bad state when you guys starting
hacking on it. 

Also, I imagine that *if* you (or anyone else) where going to add
editing to GtkHTML2 it would take _a lot_ of less time since lots of the
efforts from adding it to GtkHTML1 could be reused. And from what I
understand having the DOM could also help greatly when adding editing.

> 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.

I think that Ximian should go with GtkHTML1 since it currently does
everything they need for Evolution. I think that it would be a waste of
efforts adding CSS and DOM (not sure if these rumors where true) to
GtkHTML1 if it's not needed in Evolution. 

Preferably someone would step up and say they are interested in making
GtkHTML2 do editing and everything else we would want from a HTML-widget
in GNOME. And perhaps Ximian and the Evolution-team could switch to
GtkHTML2 at that point and we would have only one HTML-widget for the
GNOME project.

For a full-blown web browser I think that neither GtkHTML1 or GtkHTML2
is good enough and we should just do as Galeon has and use Gecko.

> 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.

Yes, at this point GtkHTML2 is considered a private library for Yelp and
is not something that people should depend on without knowing this.

We might want to have *one* official HTML widget that we say, use this,
we will continue not to break it for you. And make the other one a
private library for the app/apps using it.

At this point I'd go say that GtkHTML2 should be that officially
supported HTML widget and we make GtkHTML1 a private library of
Evolution.

> 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)

Btw, Balsa is using GtkHTML2 if I'm not mistaken. How do they solve the
editing bit? (Perhaps you can only view HTML-mails but not write them?)

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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