Hello All, Not sure how active this list is, but I thought I'd introduce myself. I've been browsing the WebKit website, downloading the latest build and just checked out the source from the subversion repository. It's a lot to wade through, but I hope to be able to contribute something. There are a few technologies that I'm particularly interested in, that show no mention on the website, and so I thought I'd ask for some information and opinions here. The two omissions that most interest me are: XForms (I submitted a bug) and CSS paged media. I've been running some tests on Safari and some other browsers on these specifications and apparently the supporst not there. However, I'm wondering what the views of those most active in this project. I see mention of WHAT WG and I'm not really sure how they play into the XForms issue. From the reading I did on their website, they seem to want to alter user-agents to bring XForms functionality to the old HTML forms specification. If both the user-agents and the web app developers will need to change to support the WebForms 2.0, then what's the advantage over directly embracing XForms? XForms: I'm not sure where to start on this, but XForms relies significantly on XPath, which I've seen mentioned at WebKit's bugzilla. With XPath in place the binding of controls to a model should be pretty straight forward to add. Also the XForms controls do not add anything that Safari doesn't already render: just the elements have different names and work slightly differently. Paged Media and the @Page Directive: Is anyone else working on paged media? This is something I'd be interested in taking advantage of, but fear I don't have the know-how to contribute anything worthwhile to this endeavor. The last issue I'm interested in is editing XHTML. I''m working on an editing app based on WebKit and, to my surprise WebKit doesn't appear to support editing of XHTML. I thought it would just work. I might be missing something, but from what I can tell WebView loads the file (passed as NSString) then just lops off the DTD declaration and turns all the tag names into upper-case. That's with the latest version of WebKit delivered by Apple. I haven't tested the latest version from the repository. Since Safari does such an excellent job of handling XHTML, I had thought the web editing functionality would do just as well. I was hoping to even add elements from another namespace and be able to use CSS selectors to style them. Which brings me to another issue. Where would I look to see how WebKit handles the various elements and CSS selectors. It strikes me that WebKit need not be familliar with a particular element to at least position the box for the element and allow CSS properties to style it.Obviously, for certain elements this would do now good (e.g., a MathML element for integral), but for a wide assortment of elements, this would be a versatile and flexible approach to handling unknown elements. In other words internally handle any element as a span or div, but then set the default CSS is display:none. I welcome any comments, pointers, or recommendations. Thanks. Take care, Rob
On Saturday 22 July 2006 09:47, Rob Burns wrote:
Paged Media and the @Page Directive: Is anyone else working on paged media? This is something I'd be interested in taking advantage of, but fear I don't have the know-how to contribute anything worthwhile to this endeavor.
Paged media is implemented in KDE's KHTML, though still missing the @page directive (I have code to parse it, but it needs some work in rendering/view). If someone want to work on it this would be a good place to start, and I can probably help guide you in the port.
I was hoping to even add elements from another namespace and be able to use CSS selectors to style them. Which brings me to another issue. Where would I look to see how WebKit handles the various elements and CSS selectors. It strikes me that WebKit need not be familliar with a particular element to at least position the box for the element and allow CSS properties to style it.Obviously, for certain elements this would do now good (e.g., a MathML element for integral), but for a wide assortment of elements, this would be a versatile and flexible approach to handling unknown elements. In other words internally handle any element as a span or div, but then set the default CSS is display:none.
Adding new elements from other namespaces and styling them using CSS should work. You just needs to make sure the browser opens it as XML. If the code is parsed as HTML it will discard unknown elements as per standard. `Allan
participants (2)
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Allan Sandfeld Jensen
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Rob Burns