September 2009 - webkit-dev - lists.webkit.org

Is it OK to remove Frame::setIsDisconnected() and isDisconnected() ?
by Sverrir Á. Berg 09 Apr '12

09 Apr '12

Working on a change in FrameTree and noticed that the checks in top() and parent() for 'checkForDisconnectedFrame' rely on a flag in Frame that as far as I can tell is never set.So my naive question is: Can I remove the corresponding code from Frame and FrameTree? If not I would like if somebody could explain how they are used so I don't break anything with my change. More detail: * My search for calls to Frame::setIsDisconnected reveals no callers in WebKit, Chromium or Google code search. * This functionality is disjoint from Frame::disconnectOwnerElement(). Thanks, Sverrir

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debug the webkit with visual studio 2005
by 赵经纬 05 Feb '10

05 Feb '10

HI: I am an neebie, i want to debug the webkit with visual studio 2005.now i have finished the steps: 1、 *Installing the Developer Tools* <http://webkit.org/building/tools.html> 2、*Getting WebKit* <http://webkit.org/building/checkout.html> 3、*Building WebKit* <http://webkit.org/building/build.html> now i want to run webkit, i open a Cygwin Shell and type this command in the shell WebKit/WebKitTools/Scripts/run-safari --debug but the result is: ERROR:couldn't determine installed safari path setting enviroments for using microsoft visual studio 2005 x86 tools How can i debug the webkit step by step? thank you!

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Implementation thoughts on HTML5 elements
by Maciej Stachowiak 26 Dec '09

26 Dec '09

Hi everyone, Recently at Apple we've been considering our plans to implement new HTML elements from HTML5. I'd like to share our thoughts with the WebKit community and see if we are in sync before passing this on to the HTML Working Group. Does anyone have thoughts to add to the below: ---------- - Sectioning elements: <section>, <article>, <aside>, <hgroup>, <header>, <footer>, <nav> These seem useful - they give a way to represent the semantics of many Web pages nicely, and could work well with accessibility features for navigating around the page, as well as other clever ways of processing Web content. They are also trivial to implement (I already did <nav>). We're fairly interested in doing the rest of these. - <dialog> element This essentially gives the same behavior as <dl> but with appropriate semantics for logs of conversations. It seems useful and easy to implement. - Elements requiring changes to <legend> parsing: <figure>, <details> These elements seem quite useful, but they will be unusable on the public Web until all browsers are updated to change how they parse <legend> and the new versions are widely adopted. Pretty much all current browsers do something idiosyncratic when parsing a <legend> element outside of a <fieldset>, which makes it impossible to make <figure> or <details> degrade gracefully via script or style. We are hesitant to implement elements that authors would feel they are unable to use, or to lead authors astray, so we are hesitant to implement the new elements until either the <legend> parsing issue is widely fixed or HTML5 uses some element other than <legend> for the caption on these elements. We will consider fixing our parsing of <legend> outside <fieldset> soon, though, so that we're not the blocker. - New media elements: <audio>, <video> We love these and have them implemented. We don't see any implementation issues in the current spec. - <canvas> We like this and we have it implemented. We don't see any implementation issues in the current spec. - Newly standard legacy elements: <keygen>, <embed> We had these for a long time before they were in HTML5. It seems like a good idea to cover them in the spec. - <mark> The basic idea for this element seems good, but the suggested UI for exposing it does not seem to entirely match the use cases, and may not be practical to deploy. Having tick marks in the scrollbar for every <mark>, and UI to cycle between them, seems too heavyweight for some of the suggested uses. We are interested in implementing the basics of <mark> soon, but probably not the requirements. - <time> It seems useful for use cases like Microformats to have a clean, unambiguous way to represent a specific time. It seems odd that there are ways to get Date objects to represent the date, time and time zone separately, but no way to get a Date representing the combination of date/time/timezone. Wouldn't the latter be a common use case, and doesn't the JavaScript Date object give sufficient APIs to unpack a Date into its components as needed? - New interactive controls: <meter>, <progress> These elements seem useful and a good idea. These controls are useful in native UI and often get hand-rolled by JavaScript libraries. We would like to expose a default native look, but with full author stylability for these. The only odd requirement is the use of inline text content in the elements to represent the state of the control. Specifying inline textContent may be a clever way to pass the initial state, but it seems very clunk as an interface for dynamically updating the state of the progress bar. Using the max and value IDL attributes of <progress> seems like it would be much easier for authors, and it seems like a problem that these only reflect the markup attributes and not the full state of the control (if the state is currently defined by text content). Likewise for the 6 attributes on <meter>. Assembling up to 6 numbers into a textContent string, which then does not cause the convenient DOM attributes to update, seems very clinky. - Ruby elements: <ruby>, <rp>, <rt> We think these are useful. Google engineers are actively working on the WebKit implementation and some initial patches have landed. - <datalist> Work on this is in progress. We think it is a good idea to offer a way to do true combo boxes, including ones with a dynamic source of filled-in values. - <output> This seems relatively simple to implement and worth implementing. - new <input> element types These seem generally useful, and we already have some implemented to various extents (search, range, email, url tel). The only concern is the sheer number of date and time controls. 6 of the 13 new input types are for dates or times. Are there real use cases for all 6? Do all 6 exhaustively cover the types of time and date input you may want to do in forms?

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Skipping Flakey Tests
by Eric Seidel 23 Dec '09

23 Dec '09

Alexey and I have been discussing if WebKit should add flakey tests to Skipped lists: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29322 Alexey asked that I bring the discussion to a larger audience. Pros: - Buildbots stay green. - Red bots/tests means your change caused an error. Cons: - Skipped tests may be more likely to be forgotten (and thus never fixed). What does WebKit think? Should we skip flakey tests which can't be resolved in a timely manner (and instead track issues via bugs) as WebKit policy? Or should we reserve the skipped list for other conditions (like bugs in the OS)? Thoughts? -eric

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Should we put the webkit.org mailing lists on Gmane?
by Adam Roben 15 Dec '09

15 Dec '09

Gmane (<http://gmane.org>) provides a few features that could be useful for thewebkit.org mailing lists, including: * a nicer web interface than Mailman's * indexed search (maybe better than Mailman's, certainly at least as good, and with a better interface) * a mail-to-news gateway (good for people who like news readers) I think it would be good to put our mailing lists on Gmane (including importing the archives of the lists). If we do this, I'd suggest using the names gmane.comp.web.webkit. {dev,changes,unassigned,etc.}. This matches what other similar projects (like Chromium) have done. Getting the lists posted and imported just requires filling out a web form (for posting the lists) and sending an email (to request the import). I'm happy to take responsibility for doing this if people are in favor of it. -Adam

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Sharing code between WebCore/bindings/js and WebCore/bindings/v8
by Adam Barth 03 Dec '09

03 Dec '09

I've been doing some work recently in our JavaScript bindings. As part of this work, I've noticed that WebCore/bindings/js and WebCore/bindings/v8 have drifted apart in some details. It's kind of ridiculous that we have so much duplicated code in these two folders. We should try to re-organize our bindings to share as much code as possible. 1) Where should the common code live? One option is to have: WebCore/bindings/js <--- common code WebCore/bindings/jsc <--- JSC specific WebCore/bindings/v8 <--- V8 specific 2) How much should we try to share? For example, we could have an abstracted notion of ArgList that works for both engines, or we could be happy to factor out common routines like createWindow <http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/bindings/js/JSDOMWindowCustom.…>. I presume Sam is a good contact for the JSC bindings. Who's a good contact for the V8 bindings? Thanks, Adam

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How to deal with localized strings
by Michelangelo De Simone 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

Hi guys, I'm gonna implement the support to the "validationMessage" HTML5 DOM attribute of form control elements, it shall return a string that describes which validation state the element is in. AFAIK this should be a localized string to be presented to the user: I tought to write a simple: enum ValidationMessage {STD_MSG1, STD_MSG2, etc...} in HTMLFormControlElement to have a simple representation of the standard messages and then leave the localization to the embedder. In order to accomplish this in HTMLFormControlElement::validationMessage() I should return the localized string obtained from the embedder and this is the trouble I went into: how such a thing is usually done in WebKit? I'd appreciate any help you may provide. Thank you. -- Bye, Michelangelo, a future ex-gsocer

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Back/forward cache for pages with unload handlers
by Brady Eidson 16 Oct '09

16 Oct '09

Since the beginning, WebKit has excluded pages with unload handlers from its back/forward cache. There has been an unspoken assumption for 6 years now that we "have to do it." In recent explorations to improvements we can make to the back/forward cache, we've collected tons of data that suggests: -It would be a huge win for end users to remove this restriction, as many pages are excluded from the page cache because they have unload handlers. -Many are designed to do the same work in the pagehide handler under Firefox. -Many of these unload handlers don't do anything actually important. In our quest to make WebKit better for end users, we'd like to explore removing this limitation. We would like to encourage developers to use pagehide in WebKit now that we support it, and we won't know if anything truly important breaks until we try it. I intend to land a patch removing the restriction sometime tomorrow. If anyone needs to keep it working for their port, please comment in the bugzilla before then, as I don't mind one bit #ifdef'ing it so it only affects the main Mac/Windows ports: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29021 Thanks, ~Brady

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FrameLoader cleanup
by Adam Barth 13 Oct '09

13 Oct '09

Every time I look at FrameLoader, it makes me cry. I think I have some time in my schedule to clean it up a bit. I haven't studied the code in detail, but my plan is as follows: 1) Separation of concerns. FrameLoader has its fingers in a bunch of different pies. In this phase, I'll try to break FrameLoader up into a bunch of smaller objects that are in charge of managing different pots of state. 2) Explicit state machines. FrameLoader holds a lot of state as bool members. In this phase, I'll try to convert these flags into an explicit state machine with clear state graph. 3) API surface reduction. FrameLoader has a large number of public entry points. In this phase, I'll reduce the API surface of the core state machines to it's more clear where clients can enter the machine. This is a big task, and I'm going to try to do it incrementally. If you have thoughts or would like input, let me know. Thanks, Adam

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Runtime setting for incomplete features
by Darin Fisher 11 Oct '09

11 Oct '09

As is described in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28941, for the Chromium project, we like to make incomplete features available behind a command line flag to help facilitate testing. I understand that the norm for WebKit is to only have compile time options for new / incomplete features. In some cases, runtime settings are defined, but these generally correspond to end user preferences or the needs of specific embedders. At any rate, I just wanted to make sure that folks were aware that some settings may only exist to help facilitate Chromium's goal of shipping incomplete features, disabled by default. Alexey asked if there are any guidelines for when these settings may be removed. I think the main thing is that the feature has to be reasonably complete and enabled by default by embedders (e.g., Chromium) that are compiling the feature. Regards, -Darin

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