[webkit-dev] WebKit render tree

[Myles C. Maxfield]

Replies inline.

> On May 31, 2016, at 11:19 PM, Andy Somogyi <somogyie at umail.iu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I’m a programming language researcher, and we are working on a new visual programming language. 
> 
> I’m investigating using WebCore as the rendering component of our language editing/visualization system. 
> 
> Essentially what I’d like to be able to do is to programmatically (C++) generate 1: a DOM tree of a new family of Element derived object, 2: rendering tree, 3: layout the tree, 4: attach a GraphicsContext to an existing window or bitmapped resource, and 5: use WebCore’s GraphicsContext to render the custom rendering tree. I’d also like to create a family of custom Element derived objects that would be attached to the rendering tree and use the rendering tree. I’d also like to respond to the standard events, i.e. mouse, keyboard, etc…

Generating a DOM is usually done in JavaScript. I'm curious about the problem you are trying to solve where JavaScript is not sufficient.

Drawing into an existing window is usually done by inserting a WebView into the view hierarchy of the window. Yet again, I'm interested in why this is not sufficient.

> 
> Do you think this would be possible using WebCore as a library and have these custom render tree / dom tree derived objects live in my own library (this is really, really the way I’d prefer to do things), or do you think it would be better to add these objects directly into the WebCore library. 
> 

Are you planning on committing any changes to trunk?

Of course it is ::possible:: to do something like this - it's all software. Are you asking if it's easy to do it? Or the best way to do it?

> I don’t think accessing any of the render tree objects in webcore would cause any issues on Mac/Unix, however, Windows sadly requires those EXPORT macros on each class def. If I added these, what would be the WebKit policy of accepting these changes? 
> 
> What is the, for lack of a better word, the “viability” of WebKit on Windows? Our project fundamentally has to be cross-platform, and currently, I’m not aware of any webkit based browsers on Windows. I’m currently looking into using webkit, firefox or blink. I’ve essentially eliminated blink because their code is very hard to follow, much harder than webkit or firefox, and I think the webkit code is the easiest to understand and use. Webkit is currently my first choice, but my only hesitation is will webkit continued to be supported on Windows. 

Windows is an official port, just like iOS / Mac / EFL / GTK.

> 
> thanks
> 
> -- Andy Somogyi PhD
> School of Informatics and Computing
> Indiana University
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