Re: WebCore revisted
Re: WebCore revisted
- Subject: Re: WebCore revisted
- From: Greg Titus <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 10:22:15 -0700
On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 10:04 AM, Daryl Thachuk wrote:
Since Omni has now started using WebCore in OmniWeb has anyone else
had success in using WebCore? Or did Omni get special secret help from
Apple in integrating WebCore in OmniWeb.
No, we did not get special secret help, we just put a lot of effort
into it. Here's a thread from the MacNN forums that talks about this.
Tim:
I wouldn't exactly say we reverse engineered it, but we did spend
about a month (in fact, we still are) researching various ways of
interacting with WebCore in a stable, efficient manner. The problem
is that although KHTML has some fairly extensive documentation, there
is little to no documentation for WebCore.
The plan right now is to continue to use our own layer over WebCore
instead of using Apple's upcoming Safari SDK (WebKit, WebFoundation).
Among other things, this allows us to make bug fixes and
customizations at our own pace instead of waiting for Apple to do it
for us.
Rick:
When WebCore was first released quite a few cocoa programers tried to
build an application around it and ran into a ton of difficulties.
I'm assuming that Omni figured out these issues and reverse
engineered the bridge that takes the layout from khtml and makes it
an actual view.
Part of the problem was that the first attempts people made to use
WebCore sort of assumed it was a complete "web engine". It's not -- it
expects to be plugged into something greater which provides text
layout, image rendering, integration into the NSView hierarchy, etc,
and as Tim2 notes, the procotols for doing this weren't documented.
But again, it's hard to call the process of figuring out how to use
that "reverse engineering" since WebCore is open source.
To further elaborate on Tim2's comments: Apple's forthcoming Safari
SDK (WebKit/WebFoundation) is expected to be closed-source. This will
be fine for everybody who wants to embed an HTML viewer as a "black
box" within their app... but we're making a full-featured web browser.
In order to distinguish ourselves from the competition we need the
freedom to enhance functionality and add innovative features in any
part of the software, and we can't do that with a "black box".
Features like the cookie filtering and zoomed form editor we've
brought forward from 4.2 to 4.5 would be much more difficult without
being able to modify the "engine" parts.
Hope this helps,
- Greg
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