Re: Question about html widget.

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

<snip>
> Unfortunately, Gecko is not a particularly attractive option right now
> because of the well-known difficulties involved with integrating it with
> a GTK app.  But if we had a lighter/nicer GtkMozEmbed or if KHTML was
> ported to GTK, it would be reasonable to consider a switch.

I'm using mozilla CVS (1.4a) and 1.3 (GTK2) and I think the bloat stats are a bit,
well, bloated :-) Using devhelp with GtkMozEmbed, I get roughly the same
starup time, and rendering is *much* quicker using GtkMozEmbed than with
GtkHTML2. As far as evolution CVS is concerned, you can see pretty
fundamental problems with gtkhtml3 as far as it's capacity to handle CSS
and DOM are concerned. As more and more people in the real world switch
to HTML mails, this is something that will slow down adoptation of
evolution if it continues to use GTKHTML. And I haven't even taken into
account the extra resources that you need to spend maintaining/enhancing
GtkHTML(2).

As someone else has already pointed out, Mozilla does support HTML
editing - the editor uses it pretty extensively. Unfortunately, there
are currently some severe limitations, as I could gather from here:

http://www.mozilla.org/editor/editor-embedding.html

Namely:
1) You've got to use XUL to embed it.
2) Using native controls from the GUI might be problematic.
3) API not frozen
4) No nice GtkWidget wrapper like GtkEmbedMoz
5) Only one editor widget per window (not too problematic for Evolution
perhaps).

A quick bugzilla search also led to this:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157128

You can, of course, use Midas, but it seems pretty unstable (in fact, it
is horked in CVS Mozilla right now). However, it is sure to improve and
seems to provide a very simply way to provide HTML editing, namely, you
simply create a GtkMozEmbed widget, write some standrd JS and controls
into it, and hey presto - you have an embedded editor - Mozilla's answer
to HTMLAREA ! Currently, the editing options seem limited, however, it
should be enough for a mailer like Evolution - in fact, GTKHTML
currently doesn't seem to offer anything more than that. It should also
be easier to have native controls for the toolbar buttons this way.

Som relevant links:

http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/
http://www.sitemason.com/pressroom/cdi6aY?id=9986
http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/

(Seems to work only in 1.3)

IMHO, as I said before, we are better of betting on Mozilla than on
GtkHTML(2) in the long term.

As far as KHTML is concerned, it doesn't seem to support editing:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/cvs-api/classref/khtml/index.html

KMail doesn't seem to support HTML editing in its editor with KHTML either. However,
it's HTML, CSS and DOM support is pretty good, so, it might be a decent candidate
for porting, if we're planning to replace GtkHTML2, or have a completely native,
lightweight web browser for GNOME that does not use Mozilla. However, we'll need to
question where it is really worth the effort now that Mozilla is on it's way to
provide the GRE which should be a comparatively small dependency to add.

> 
> -- Ettore
-- 
Rgds,
Biswa.