[webkit-dev] WebKit Project Goals

[Maciej Stachowiak]

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.