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

[Helge Hess]

On Mar 23, 2007, at 15:31, Mark Rowe wrote:
> Gecko, IE, and WebKit all have commercial backing.  KHTML, prior to  
> Apple's involvement, had a very insubstantial market share and  
> suffered from one of the problems I alluded to earlier: great  
> standards support, but poor real-world compatibility.

I suppose nobody questions that, its just that the goals are  
different. Apparently Nikolaus just wants to build a browser with  
great standards support (maybe thats why its named *Simple* WebKit?).  
So why bother him? ;-)

The only thing I'm a bit concerned about is how the two  
implementations would live side by side if SimpleWebKit directly  
implements WebKit classes instead of using a separate class hierarchy  
which is then somehow mapped to the WebKit classes.
To bad we don't have namespaces in ObjC ;-)


> > How do you know before you have done it? Can you predict the future?
> > And has the pure number of developers ever been an indicator for
> > project success?
> You don't know, but the web isn't going to sit still for the next  
> two or three years while a fledgling browser catches up.  The  
> Internet is becoming a central part of the computer experience, and  
> many new technologies are being introduced to meet needs as the  
> arise.  Keeping up with the start of the art takes work.

As a matter of fact a cleanroom implementation of those "many new  
technologies" is quite often much faster to implement than tweaking  
10..15 year old, aging C++ code which needs to be super-cautions wrt  
changes.

Well, thats a rather stupid discussion, no? Why not stop it? ;-) I'm  
quite interested in what Nikolaus comes up with, though I also doubt  
it will be useful for *me* personally.
Well, even if just a small JavaScript ObjC interpreter comes out of  
this, it would be a very cool and useful thing! :-)

Greets,
  Helge
--
Helge Hess
http://www.helgehess.eu/