[webkit-dev] WebKit Project Goals

[Maciej Stachowiak]

I sent this a while ago with not much comment. Any thoughts? Should I  
post this on webkit.org somewhere?

  - Maciej

On May 10, 2007, at 3:34 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I recently watched a video on the topic of preventing poisonous  
> people from hurting an open source project. One of the practices it  
> recommends for a large open source project is to have a "mission  
> statement", so it's clear to everyone what is and isn't in scope for  
> the project. I'm not too fond of the name "mission statement" (it  
> sounds a little corporate) but I do think it's important to write  
> down our goals as a project.
>
> Ultimately I'd like to put this on the WebKit site, but I wanted to  
> throw out some ideas for discussion. I'd like to hear if anyone  
> thinks I have missed any project goals, if any of these are worded  
> badly, or if it is worth calling out more non-goals.
>
>
> WebKit Project Goals
>
> WebKit is an open source Web content engine for browsers and other  
> applications. We value real-world web compatibility, standards  
> compliance, stability, performance, security, portability, usability  
> and relative ease of understanding and modifying the code  
> (hackability).
>
> Web Content Engine - The project's primary focus is content deployed  
> on the World Wide Web, using standards-based technologies such as  
> HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM. However, we also want to make it  
> possible to embed WebKit in other applications, and to use it as a  
> general-purpose display and interaction engine.
>
> Open Source - WebKit should remain freely usable for both open  
> source and proprietary applications. To that end, we use BSD-style  
> and LGPL licenses.
>
> Compatibility - For users browsing the web, compatibility with their  
> existing sites is essential. We strive to maintain and improve  
> compatibility with existing web content, sometimes even at the  
> expense of standards. We use regression testing to maintain our  
> compatibility gains.
>
> Standards Compliance - WebKit aims for compliance with relevant web  
> standards, and support for new standards
> In addition to improving compliance, we participate in the web  
> standards community to bring new technologies into standards, and to  
> make sure new standards are pratical to implement in our engine. We  
> use regression testing to maintain our standards compliance gains.
>
> Stability - The main WebKit code base should always maintain a high  
> degree of stability. This means that crashes, hangs and regressions  
> should be dealt with promptly, rather than letting them pile up.
>
> Performance - Maintaining and improving speed and memory use is an  
> important goal. We never consider performance "good enough", but  
> strive to constantly improve. As web content becomes richer and more  
> complex, and as web browsers run on more limited devices,  
> performance gains continue to have value even if normal browsing  
> seems fast enough.
>
> Security - Protecting users from security violations is critical. We  
> fix security issues promptly to protect users and maintain their  
> trust.
>
> Portability - The WebKit project seeks to address a variety of  
> needs. We want to make it reasonable to port WebKit to a variety of  
> desktop, mobile, embedded and other platforms. We will provide the  
> infrastructure to do this with tight platform integration, reusing  
> native platform services where appropriate and providing friendly  
> embedding APIs.
>
> Usability - To the extent that WebKit features affect the user  
> experience, we want them to work in accordance with good human  
> interface design principles, and to mesh well with platform-native  
> HI conventions.
>
> Hackability - To make rapid progress possible, we try to keep the  
> code relatively easy to understand, even though web technologies are  
> often complex. We try to use straightforward algorithms and data  
> structures when possible, we try to write clear, maintainable code,  
> and we continue to improve names and code structure to aid  
> understanding. When tricky "rocket science" code is truly needed to  
> solve some problem, we try to keep it bottled up behind clean  
> interfaces.
>
>
> Non-Goals
>
> WebKit is an engine, not a browser. We do not plan to develop or  
> host a full-featured web browser based on WebKit. Others are welcome  
> to do so, of course.
>
> WebKit is an engineering project not a science project. For new  
> features to be adopted into WebKit, we strongly prefer for the  
> technology or at least the use case for it to be proven.
>
> WebKit is not a bundle of maximally general and reusable code - we  
> build some general-purpose parts, but only to the degree needed to  
> be a good web content engine.
>
> WebKit is not the solution to every problem. We focus on web  
> content, not complete solutions to every imaginable technology need.
>
>
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