Well, I for one (though as i'm not writing the code this is just my comments) would not be willing to choose a rendering engine based on whether it works or not on platform X.
Both Mozilla and KHTML work quite well on a large number of platforms. I'd need to know a lot more about why Mozilla doesn't work well on OpenBSD before ruling out gecko - like, is it due to something missing on OpenBSD itself. In particular due to the very few numbers of people using it on the desktop, I'd say if Mozilla doesn't work on that platform it's the problem of obsd or mozilla, not Wine.
On the other hand, I don't really think Gecko is right for this anyway, so it's something of a moot point. Generally though I'd say that making decisions based on what certain platforms can and cannot do is a bad idea when said platform is in the minority of usage (esp when it's all open source). Flame away.
On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 11:23, Keith Matthews wrote:
On 11 Nov 2002 08:29:49 +0000 "Mike Hearn" m.hearn@signal.qinetiq.com wrote:
Hi,
Please make sure you try whatever rendering engine you choose with a wide sample of CHM pages. From what I remember of my Windows days, CHM help often contains lots of IEisms, from VBScript to IE specific DHTML, ie they're not standard HTML despite the name.
Whatever renderer is chosen then should be one we can easily fork and massage into a relatively IE compatible one. Here is a quick roundup of the options based on what I know of the available engines:
- Gecko: the best (in terms of features/compatability/speed) rendering
engine around. Also benefits from being very widely deployed at least on Linux. Note that soon Mozilla will be splitting into a GRE (gecko runtime environment), then an XRE (xul runtime) layered on top, with Mozilla being an "application" on top of that framework. When this happens, making the GRE a dependancy of Wine would not be such a big deal IMHO, it's only a few megs at the moment.
- Pros: We get a high quality rendering engine that we know is
powerful enough to do what we need, and when the GRE thing happens it'll be relatively easy to embed too. Already has IWebBrowser interfaces(bitrotted afaik).
- Cons: Gecko codebase is huge and complex, adding whatever IEisms
are necessary may be hard. Overhead of XPCOM etc.
I'll add something else here.
Mozilla is an absolute pain to run on OpenBSD. The porting team have recently worked out that they can get it to run as long as they statically link it.
I have no idea if the Gecko part is affected by this, and I'm aware that Wine does not currently run on OBSD anyway, but why make things more difficult.
Konq runs happily so KHTML is probably no problem and I have not heard of any problems with GtkHTML.
-
Mike Hearn