[webkit-dev] HbbTV support within Webkit

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Mark Toller <mark.toller at samsung.com>wrote:

> **
>
> I'd like to ask the Webkit developers their opinion on providing some
> support for HbbTV [1] within Webkit.
>

By "some support", what exactly do you mean?

Our lab, Samsung Electronics Research Institute (SERI), has been heavily
> involved in HbbTV and our current solution is based on Webkit. We would
> like to provide our changes back to the community.****
>
> I know that support requests for CE-HTML have been briefly touched upon in
> the past. As I understand it, the main objection to providing support
> within WebKit is that the CE-HTML specification is not freely available,
> and thus restricts the number of developers who can fully understand it and
> therefore provide fixes / support.****
>
> **
>

It also burdens other contributors who refactor and maintain that code. WML
was a mess and imposed a significant maintenance cost on everyone who
worked on script and input elements.

In reality, much of the CE-HTML specification simply profiles which parts
> of the W3C standard behaviour are mandatory, optional and/or recommended.
> OIPF then profiles CE-HTML (dropping some requirements, extending others to
> match W3C/HTML5), HbbTV profiles out even more of CE-HTML. ****
>
> ** **
>
> Other parts of OIPF and CE-HTML do not need to be implemented within
> Webkit itself. Some can be implemented as object plugins (e.g. AV Control
> and local video), while others, such as the JavaScript classes required,
> can be inserted into the JavaScriptCore at runtime.
>

I have a hard time understanding the exact requirement for supporting
CE-HTML and HbbTV. What kind of changes do you want to make to the trunk
WebKit?

What I propose is to provide the basic support required within Webkit in
> order to at least load the XHTML portions of HbbTV applications and provide
> the correct key handling to drive them. In order to provide 'full' HbbTV
> support, implementations would need to provide the plugins and additional
> JavaScript classes to complete the picture.
>

Making WebKit more pluggable to support CE-HTML and HbbTV sound good to me
as long as it doesn't significantly increase the maintenance burden on
contributors.

- Ryosuke
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