Re: [gtk-list] ANNOUNCE: GtkMozilla 0.1 released

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Ever wanted to use html pages in your app?
> Show your help-pages in a fancy way?
> 
> Now it's all possible. GtkMozilla is a widget that makes it easy
> to embedd the layout engine from the Mozilla project in any Gtk+
> program.
> 

Cool!

We (we = the Gnome Workshop project and the Gnome project, I think) would
really like to get this going with the Bonobo object embedding framework,
in addition to a widget. This has the following advantages:

 - an NPL widget can't be linked with any of the GPL apps, so 
   it does not do us much good. both Netscape and the FSF have 
   lawyers, so this is a real issue.

 - Lots of embedded Bonobo objects can be provided by the same Mozilla 
   process; so any per-instance RAM and startup time is saved.

 - People can plug alternative browser components into apps; 
   and we don't have library versioning problems.

Since you've written the widget, you will probably be able to do the
Bonobo thing in about a day or two, plus or minus some learning curve.
It's really very easy; look at guppi2/src/component/ in CVS, or the test
program in the 'bonobo' module. Basically the Bonobo stuff takes a widget
(which you've written) and exports it for embedding. It's a wrapper around
your widget, basically.

The slightly harder part is designing an IDL interface for a "browser,"
then exporting it (though Mozilla may already have such an interface?).

Check out our screenshot at http://www.gnome.org/gw.html. I hope you'll
consider working on this; it's hard for those of us with no knowledge of
Mozilla to get started on.

Havoc