[webkit-dev] User Stylesheets changes I'd like to make

[David Hyatt]

Right now the user stylesheet location is stored as a URL.  This is  
based off ancient history, namely that we happened to store the  
preference this way on Mac.  Even though Safari only allows you to  
pick local files from its UI for user stylesheets, the preference  
itself is a URL.  Because of this, the current code is making an  
assumption that remote URLs should be allowed to work as user  
stylesheets.  On Mac and Qt only, we have a UserStyleSheetLoader  
object that is dealing with remote URLs.  Other platforms seem to just  
not support this.

I would like to eliminate this object on all platforms.

The remote URL loading is asynchronous, and this is undesirable for a  
user stylesheet anyway.  It can lead to bugs like the one fixed here  
(which only fixed local files):

http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/30078

There's basically no way any WebKit client could ever have been  
relying on remote URLs, so I'm really not concerned about breaking any  
existing WebKit clients by removing this feature on OS X.

I will be adding new APIs to WebKit (just as I did for user scripts)  
that will allow the injection of an arbitrary number of user sheets,  
with the full text of the sheet being supplied by the caller instead.   
This will allow an application to support remote stylesheets if they  
want to (in a proper fashion) and make sure they inject it at the time  
of their choosing.

However for the single user stylesheet URL pref, I would like to  
eliminate the remote loading capability.

Are there any objections to this change?

dave
(hyatt at apple.com)