[webkit-dev] WebKit render tree

[Andy Somogyi]

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…

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. 

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. 

thanks

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