Re: gtkhtml2 vs. gtkhtml1

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On 17 Sep 2002, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 10:49, Radek Doulík wrote:
> > 
> > On Út, 2002-09-17 at 10:49, Sander Vesik wrote:
> > > Fpr DOM part you will have to talk to billh, but we definately want css2
> > > for help for layout and formating.
> > 
> > Yeah, my question was meant more like, do we really need those or
> > couldn't we somewhat overcome it? What are the reasons to use CSS? I
> > don't think help layout is so complicated that it must use css2 for
> > layout and formating. At least from what I've seen, the GNOME help pages
> > have pretty simple layout and formating.
> 
> Even relatively simple things rather need at least basic CSS support. 
> HTML on its own doesn't handle presentation worth crud.  Given decent
> CSS support and a good designer, docs could not only be functional
> (after all plain text files are functional) but could be made quite easy
> to read and good looking.  Without CSS, there isn't even a way to do
> something as easy as set a coloured border around an element.  At least,
> not one that works in all standards compliant browsers.
> 

CSS is good because:

	* it allows the layout to be largely separate from the xml->html 
	  conversion part. This is vey important if the base dtd on which
	  the documents are based on is large (like say docbook)

	* you get large amounts of browser independence

	* if you at some point want to outoput in some other format you
	  won't have to do a complete rewrite rfom scratch

> Another thing I think of, if we use a gtk-based html renderer (such as
> gkthtml1/2), would it be possible to do some kind of css extension to
> pull colours out from the gtk theme?  Or do they already allow this? 
> This way things like header-block layouts (like in the e-mail view in
> Evo.) can be coloured according to the user's theme.  Perhaps a way that
> is backwards compatible with standard CSS, so documents viewed in
> galeon/ie/etc. look decent, but look "proper" in the help-viewer or
> whatever application.
> 

I think gtkhtml2/yelp already do do this - so if you don't explicitly set
background and text colour, you will get the ones from gtk+ theme.

	Sander

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