Re: SimpleWebKit (was GNUstep Web browser (was Re: WebKit Bounty))

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> I don't think so. Embedding full Gecko or KHTML probably requires  
> much more resources than SimpleWebKit. As mentioned several times by  

Agreed.

> others there are more uses to HTML than just web browsing :-)

Yes. Sure. There is e.g. handling HTML formatted mails. Or viewing
Help pages etc.

> > I have no idea how to really solve that otherwise - besides renaming
> > all classes to avoid name conflicts. But that hurts those >80%
> > applications which just need either one.
>
> Right now we have no applications using either one, not sure where  
> you get the 80% number :-).

The <20% is on those applications where I can imagine that you need a
simple
and a full web rendering engine in parallel. A Web browser just needs
one.
A HTML-Mailer just needs one. A help viewer just needs one.

Well, you may run a browser and a help viewer in parallel in separate
processes
and both can use a differently powerful set of WebKit.frameworks.

But in my understanding this is a different point - or I still do not
understand the problem.

> And how it will be used also remains to be seen :-) I'd say that  
> potentially 80+ *will* use both (because SimpleWebKit could be used a  
> lot for widgets, not for regular HTML) and still will need to branch  
> into the public web.

But why would you want to duplicate things by adding SimpleWebKit if
you have a
full WebKit available?

> You just need to do the API as a frontend, exactly like its done for  
> KHTML. Don't know how this will hurt any application. It makes the  
> backend slightly more complex (because of the WebKit layer).

Hm. I think the architecture is quite different from what you assume.

Simple webkit has no backend besides AppKit NSView and NSCell.

It implements all the @interfaces of WebView, WebFrame, DOMHTML
etc. based on Foundation and AppKit. And most generally, it is a
single
subclass of NSView that can be integrated into an application:
WebView.

It provides a method to take an URL and view its contents. Much
similar
to NSImageView which gets an NSImage and displays it.

Well, and a Browser is a GUI application that uses this WebView in
each
document window and provides some bells and whistles. Not more.

> > Yes. But neither WebKit nor SimpleWebKit supports RSS (directly). So,
> > you can link either one with the RSS framework.
>
> Of course, but I don't want to load a 10MB browser on startup when I  
> just need to render a few tags :-)

Well, with full WebKit, you load 4 frameworks: WebKit, WebCore,
JavaScriptCore, JavaScriptGlue.
With SimpleWebKit, you load just one: (Simple)WebKit.framework

Currently, the code size (incl. symbols) for an Intel Mac is 1.6 MByte
and for the ARM processor (libWebKit.so) 1.2 MByte.

> >> In fact I expect that a lot of frameworks and apps will use HTML
> >> plugins instead of native GUI elements over time (sometime
> >> SimpleWebKit might be perfect for). Just check NewsFire or Adium.

> Using HTML for regular UI stuff is getting more and more common.

Yes, I understand this approach - but it makes things much slower
instead of using the builtin widgets (well Moore's law will help).

And, I have still the impression that you don't have to include two
rendering engines in those applications. Just choose one and send it
the appropriate HTML and JavaScript strings.

> Anyways, you probably want to concentrate on coding instead of  
> discussions ;-) Actually I'm *most* interested in a GNUstep/xyzStep  
> for the N800. And this involves a browser which is sufficiently small  

Yes... Me too :-)

> to run on that device.

Since it runs on the Sharp Zaurus, it should also work on the N800 (as
soon as I have a working EABI cross compiler on MacOS X - that costs
me more headaches).

Now, let's put up the sleeves again and fix bugs...

Nikolaus