GTK text widget (was Re: [gtk-list] Proposal for a new project)

[Josh MacDonald <jmacd CS Berkeley EDU>]

With all this talk of KDE and HTML and all sorts of other people starting
to really use GTK, it strikes me that someday, someone is going to notice
that the text widget doesn't really work.  I suppose I'll be having time
to finish it after finals, but have no immediate motivation because I have
no application demanding its completion.  Further, I realized that while
most of the technical details are mostly complete, I have no experience
actually connecting a text widget up to anything non-trivial, and therefore
the API is currently almost non-existent.

It seems to me, that an HTML widget isn't really much different from a
text widget, considering that the GTK text widget, in its current state,
supports variable width fonts.  I suspect that any HTML widget is going to
duplicate a lot of code.  It would seem to me that adding the ability to
do various justifications and centering, and treating things like images
and tables as things with a unique, specially sized font, gets you almost
all the way there (neglecting the boring part about parsing HTML).

I'm wondering if people have given this any thought to this or could 
recommend the appropriate path to completing the text widget and/or any of 
your other wild desires.  At the bare minimum, does anyone have suggestions 
for what the rest of the text widget API should look like?

-josh