Re: [gtk-list] Re: Gzilla 0.1.4 released

[Raph Levien <raph acm org>]

On Thu, 27 Nov 1997 jchrr@HRZ.Uni-Bielefeld.DE wrote:

> What do you guys think about making a special "plug-in" version of gzilla for
> GIMP ? i.e. remove all refferences to the different file-format libraries,
> and use gimp's "load-image" PDB-call to load images. This would be the
> perfect Help-browser. Mabye with a PDB interface to select pages from a
> plug-in...

Well, my original goal for writing gzilla was as a help system for the 
Gimp, so I'm very much interested in adapting it for that purpose.

However, I'm not convinced that the PDB is the best way to load images. 
The main drawback is that they don't do progressive image loading, a 
feature I consider quite important in a web browser. There's also the 
overhead of invoking plugins, which could be significant for Web pages 
containing many small GIFs. My feeling is that GIF and JPEG account for 
at least 99% of all images on the Web, and that PNG will take care of the 
needs of almost everybody else, so a plug-in architecture for images is 
not really necessary.

The GIF and JPEG loaders for Gzilla take less than a thousand lines of 
code, so there's no real gain for taking them out.

On the other hand, I definitely see a place for a plug-in architecture 
so that apps can select URLs. I'm still trying to figure out the best way 
to do this. It's also something the Gnome people are interested in, as a 
general mechanism for all Gnome apps.

Raph