Simple Web Kit status

[address@hidden]

Hi all,
right before FOSDEM it is the appropriate time to write a little about
the status of SWK, our pure-Objective-C WebKit re-implementation.

I have now added History and the Back-Forward list management, so that
navigating through the Web really becomes possible.

So I think we have reached a state which comes close to the first
Safari 1.0.0 release where a majority of web pages had not been
rendered completely correctly. But with user's feedback, we can fix
this all, like it was fixed for Safari.

Here a short overview about the feature completion status:

HTML
        Loading                         99%             (NSURLConnection -> 
parser)
        Parser                          99%             (HTML 4.0 -> DOM Tree)
        Evaluator                               90%             (DOM Tree -> 
NSAttributedString)
EcmaScript
        Loading                         100%    (handling <script> and <script 
src="">)
        Parser                          90%             not well tested for 
completeness and robustness
        Evaluator                               50%
        Objects                         0%
CSS
        Loading                         100%    (handling <style> and <tag 
style="">)
        Parser                          0%
        Evaluator                               0%
WebView, WebFrame, ...
        Basics                          100%    (interworking of all these 
classes)
        Advanced                                70%             (not completely 
working are Forms & Frames)
        Editing                         0%              (not intended)

Since more and more pages are using AJAX/JavaScript you will sometimes
see error messages from the JS parser. And, since we don't have CSS
yet, more modern pages will lack all the gleamour and optimized
appearance that you are used to.

Before criticism comes up again: the architecture is prepared to add
CSS and complete JavaScript. It is "just" work to do it. We don't know
major technical problems that would be show-stoppers.

There is only one major known performance issue that will show up: if
a script changes a DOMTree element, we currently rebuild the full
NSAttributedString that represents the web page. This can become a lot
of work for large pages. But there is room for optimization by just
rebuilding a subrange.

And, there is Vespucci, the SWK based GAP Web Browser.

So, try, test, enjoy, help, ...

Nikolaus

PS: It would be nice to have a demonstration on out FOSDEM stand. Who
plans to bring a working GNUstep sytem?