[webkit-gtk] Future of direct DOM access in WebKitGTK

[Gavin Smith]

(please CC me in responses as I am not subscribed to the list)

I'd like to ask what is the future of the DOM access functions that
were deprecated in WebKitGTK+ 2.22.0. The documentation advises using
a "JavaScriptCore" API instead.

https://webkitgtk.org/2018/09/03/webkitgtk2.22.0-released.html

I think it would be unfortunate if this functionality were removed.
The DOM access gives programs a way to access information inside the
HTML pages that are being displayed. Even if it can be done by running
JavaScript, this information needs to come back to the controlling
program and this would require some kind of protocol for communicating
over a textual channel between the JavaScript and native halves of the
program. I think it is simpler to be able to do everything in C.

This is for a program to read locally installed HTML documentation. See

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2019-10/msg00010.html

and the earlier thread

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2019-04/msg00042.html

for more context on what we are trying to achieve.

As an aside, it would be even better if you could have direct DOM
access in the main thread, as was the case with WebKitGTK version 1. I
don't think there is any benefit for the multi-thread model for this
use case.

We could have the slightly bizarre situation of it being easier to do
processing on the HTML files separately (to do it robustly, with some
HTML parsing library), than to extract the information from the
embedded browser engine.

PS I could only subscribe to this mailing list by moving the date on
my computer back 5 minutes, otherwise I got a "Please take a few
seconds to fill out the form before submitting it." message.