[webkit-dev] Need Help for GTK Port

[Mike Emmel]

Great !

Some history on the port.

My initial plans for the port where to have it gdk only with all widgets in svg.
I am continuing to experiment with a fork of webkit that does not
depend on traditional
widget toolkits. The GDK port can easily be turned into a normal GTK port.

For use with GTK I think the main browser surface should continue to
depend only on gdk
as it does now. But we need to create a GTK widget wrapper for the
browser surface.
Once this is done you should be able to use GTK widgets to finish the port.

If you take this approach the gtk-webcore work may be helpful for some
parts of the port.

My goal is to allow both GTK and SVG widgets to coexist in the browser and
be first class mixable widgets thus you need to support potentially
different GTK wrappers
for the gdk/webkit widget to allow webkit/svg widgets to be wrapped
and exposed as a GTK widget.

If you wish to follow this design not only would we get a GTK/webkit
browser but we would offer a new way to create custom GTK widgets
using the core gdk/webkit surface.

I think that you will find its almost impossible to implement a
scrollbar in webkit for webkit
since RenderLayer's are required and assume the existence of a native scrollbar.
Also the Frame assumes that the webkit surface is always a full
featured browser.
But if you just implement scrollbars and the Frame using GTK and the
other predefined widgets then its possible to work towards the goal of
using webcore as a basis to implement widgets. With the current design
its not hard to add new gtk/svg widgets inside the framework
its just difficult to implement the framework itself in svg.

My experimental work is based on removing all the internal
dependencies and assumptions in WebKit that it is running as a full
featured browser and has a native toolkit.

I have succeeded in creating a version of webkit that is a pure
library independent any toolkit which can be embedded with a trivial
toolkit dependent binding that takes a few days to write. The main
external dependencies are cairo curl and icu.

If you keep the concept of webkit/gdk which is simply a version of gdk
extended to support xml and ensure the gtk dependencies are clean I'm
confident that we can create a way to
support webkit/svg widgets as first class gtk widgets.

Of course you can just do a traditional port but thats not any fun :)


On 2/13/07, atul <atul.mehrotra at celunite.com> wrote:
> Hii.
>  This is mail in regard of the GDK port Of Webkit.. It seems Qt Port for
> Linux is quite well maintained but that's not same for GDK port. I & my
> colleague Shri want to contribute for the GDK port of Webkit Which can
> meet long needed demand of gnome users having a KHTML+GTK browser.
>         We (me & shri) both have a worked on GTK+Webcore
> (http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/ ) for sometime & as we are new to
> the current WEBKIT ToT we need someone to guide/help us for understand &
> contribute to the latest Webkit For GDK port. This mail is an effort to
> start a dialog with  those others who are interested to work in the same
> direction so that we can all coordinate our resources rather than
> working at crosspurposes.
>
> Thanx,
>
> Atul Mehrotra
>
>
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