Re: GNUstep Web browser (was Re: WebKit Bounty)

[Michael Thaler]

Hi,

> I think it is worth to mention SimpleWebKit here - a rough
> implementation of
> WebView, WebFrame, WebFrameView, WebDataSource etc. - completely
> written
> in Objective-C without any C++. The reason is that it must cross-
> compile
> on gcc 2.95.3 for some ARM processors.
>
> Here is the source code to look at:
> http://www.quantum-step.com/download/sources/mySTEP/SimpleWebKit/
>
> It is not complete but does HTML parsing - HTML rendering is not yet
> available since I don't completely understand
> the interaction between WebHTMLDocumentRepresentation, DOMHTML and the
> WebHTMLView classes.

What makes writing HTML parsers/rendering engines really difficult is not 
parsing correct HTML and showing it. The problem is parsing/showing incorrect 
HTML. Apple spends a lot of resources testing WebKit with a lot of buggy web 
pages and make them show reasonably well. Some KDE people consider using 
WebKit in KDE4 because it is a waste of resources to duplicate all this work.

Personally I think there is absolutely no point in writing some simple HTML 
parser/rendering engine that doesn't show buggy web pages reasonably well 
(except as an academic excercise). Who wants to use something like this?

And whats the point in writing a HTML parser/rendering enginge in Objective-C 
anyway? It is absolutely no difference for the user and it is even no big 
difference for developers because most of them will never touch the HTML 
parser/renderer code anyway.

Greetings,
Michael