[webkit-dev] AJAX Support

[Maciej Stachowiak]

Hi Andrew,

On Dec 24, 2005, at 5:03 PM, Andrew Eberhard wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm almost certain this topic has been covered before so I'll try  
> to keep my questions brief and will gladly read any resources  
> already devoted to thereto (I just signed up for this mailing list).
>
> Basically, I'm an AJAX developer for a large civil engineering  
> company.  As User Interface Manager for the corporate intranet,  
> I've regularly tried to enrich the capabilities of our intranet  
> without increasing bandwidth needs and/or client requirements.
>
> To date, my efforts have focused primarily on IE (the corporate  
> browser standard), but I am being asked (and honestly want) to  
> support other browsers including FireFox and Safari.

Glad to hear it - supporting all major browsers is a great way to go.

>
> It seems to me that there are a couple of things that are missing  
> from Safari.  If anyone could speak to either of these (potentially  
> incorrect) observations, please do.
>
> 1.  Although Safari implements most of the XML Extras in FireFox,  
> as far as I can tell it lacks a critical piece of the AJAX  
> framework:  the ability to apply an XSLT transform to an XML  
> document received asynchronously from a server into HTML.  I  
> believe Safari supports .innerHTML on most tags (could be wrong),  
> so the transform process seems to be the only missing piece of the  
> puzzle in this regard.

XSLTProcessor is available in the latest cvs version of WebKit,  
though not any released version of Safari yet. You might find it  
helpful for testing.

> 2.  There seems to be a number of bugs with contenteditable regions  
> in Safari.  Strictly speaking these are not part of the AJAX  
> "platform", but having reliable editable regions would be very  
> useful for online applications.  The Writely.com website has some  
> rather vague descriptions of the problems.

We'd love to know what specific bugs you run into. Historically,  
WebKit editing support has focused on full-document editing in Mail.  
We're currently looking to make in-page editing via contenteditable  
work well too. Specific bug reports would really help in this area.

Regards,
Maciej