Re: Plans for ahead

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> > There are really good engines that support running web-based 
> > applications well.
>
> Yes, they have become really big beasts to support thousands of pages 
> of standards.

Yes. Unmanageable beats of humongous size which trash you computer now 
and then. I work in the cloud everyday with 4 different browsers open. 
At the end, they all suck, just differently. They are amazingly complex 
and it is a miracle they do work, and they do, just not 24/7.

I really like a small and fast browser to do a quick lookup on the web.

I would really like to have an engine easy to embed a help view, a 
documentation view or whatever.
I find it ridiculous that on Mac or Window syo uopen documentation and 
you see your application grind because it is opening up one of these 
"monsters" to display a simple page.

If you only have a SUV or a pickup, when you go to the city, you are out 
of place. Use a VW up! or a Smart. When you go on a track then, a Land 
Rover or an Unimog might more appropriate.


> > Yet even long-standing, reasonably well written engines such as 
> > Opera's Presto are being dropped.

Yes. As a long time user of Opera, I am saddened by this. The new Opera 
uses Chrome's engine. While certain sites behave better, Opera is now 
slower, consumes more memory, was worse typography and stopped providing 
some unique features.

Opera was my "quick browser" to look up something without killing my 
computer. A quick look at documentation, a quick search on wikipedia. 
Now it has no real use anymore. now it is just another browser and I use 
it less and less, I can just use Firefox.

> A good GNUstep browser would use an existing engine, but integrate 
> with a GS-centric environment:
> > - by using GNUstep's theme for its chrome,
>
> Isn't that working out of the box? Vespucci & SWK just use the NSView 
> subclasses provided by GUI.

It does! again, Misinformed statements. By its native nature, SWK needs 
no crap: it just draws your buttons with GS! That is, theme GS and your 
form elements will look perfect.
Actually, I suppose we will have a problem when trying to style these 
elements as certain websites do. But between the two evils, I want to be 
native when I can.
For what I wnat SWK this is perfect. A WebView is really a good citizen 
that looks like other views

This comes out of the box.

> > - by exposing GNUstep's Services in its textboxes and for its images,
> > - by using GNUstep's save panels, by understanding the concept of 
> > bundles,
>
> what do you mean/expect by that?

It does all that. These are misinformed statements. It it does not it 
means some code is missing and can be done.
But since it is a proper citizen, being native, it integrates already 
with services. You can select text and run a service, copy&paste RTF 
(yay, because it is!) and just enjoy life.

> > - by storing its preferences and cache inside GNUstep's folder 
> > structure (~/GNUstep/),
>
> AFAIK it uses NSUserDefaults and WebPreferences which can be adapted 
> to GNUstep's folder structure (if they don't do already).

It does, actually, since both SWK and Vespucci are "full" GNUstep 
citizen, more than ANY port of WebKit or Gecko will ever be ("by 
definition") the are also well behaved citizens- They respect your GS 
evnironment and put preferences, caches etc where they should be.

To me it clearly looks that you are ciriticizing something you didn't 
even take the time to compile.

> > - by registering web shortcuts (e.g. .url files) with GNUstep's 
> > extension registry,
> > - by using GS menus (whatever they are as configured by the user) and 
> > therefore by using GS-like keyboard shortcuts
>
> What is missing there?
>
> > Providing an alternate implementation for use by Vespucci seems useful.
>
> You can extend Vespucci and replace SWK if you like. It should in 
> theory be as simple as replacing the WebKit.framework or linker search 
> path.
>
> But I don't want to argue at all against any alternatives to SWK and 
> Vespucci. I just make aware that "something" exists.
> The alternatives may be much better and easier to develop, but do not 
> exist.

Exactly. Vespucci is just a little small app, on Mac I can build it 
against SWK and WebKit (1.x) easily and compare. I have done that 
exactly to be able to debug SWK itself.

Do you want an alternative to Vespucci? Write it.
Do you want an alternative to SWK? Write it. If you write it well and 
has the same basic API as SWK, you can just test it with Vespucci.

> If we would contribute as much code as we recently started to write 
> e-mails what *should* be done, there would be more progress :)
+1

We have this issue on this mailing list often

That said, I remark that it is unlikely and for me not even desirable 
for SWK to become Gecko, (think of S both as Simple as Small), it could 
become something usable with a reasonable amount of work.
I would say 1month of Nikolaus excellent coding capabilities plus the 
equivalent time of a GS Gui hacker (e.g. Fred) and me. But it is not 
probably going to happen any time soon, although it has been fun up to now.

Riccardo