Re: Boiling the Oceans [was Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews]

[David Chisnall]

On 3 Aug 2017, at 09:04, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> 
> A lightweight browser for reading docs is good _only_ if the engine is embed 
> in the documentation browser

There are some other places where a lightweight embedded HTML engine would be 
good.  For example, I use MacDown on macOS, which uses a WebView to render the 
rendered output.  WebKit is overkill for this and SWK would probably be 
adequate.  It’s generating HTML because that’s what existing Markdown 
processors do, not because it needs complete support for HTML 5 and CSS 3.  
Similarly, in a mail client 99% of the HTML email I receive is a little bit of 
styling and some embedded images: something with a smaller attack surface than 
a full-fledged web view is probably a better option for rendering it (though I 
don’t know how much fuzzing has been done with SWK and how safe it actually is 
in the presence of untrusted input).

For a browser, as you say, if I can’t point it at an arbitrary web URL and have 
a 99% chance that it will render correctly, I’m going to end up with annoyed 
users.

David