Continued pleas of the Aweb team!
Date 20-Oct-2004 22:04:27
Topic: Announcement
| We've been asking for help on porting KHTML for over a year now. I think litterally I've been asking for this about fifty times now, but no one ever reacts. Why?
Having worked closely with browser technologies for about five years now, I can tell you that IBrowse, AWeb and Voyager are incredibly far behind what other browsers can do. This is 1996-1997 standards. IBrowse doesn't even support HTML4!
We are not only missing CSS, but the Document Object Model, proper unicode handling, XML and Javascript 1.5. These are things that make up a minimum requirement Windows browser as of today. Opera, Firefox, Safari, Konqueror and partly IE fullfil these requirements. Working with modern standards, such as the DOM makes it completely impossible to support Amiga browsers.
This can only be solved properly by porting an existing open source HTML engine, where either KHTML or Gecko stand out. Upgrading an existing engine would take a huge effort, and that would IMHO be a huge waste.
I can of course not rant on people who are not developers (including myself), but I think it's remarkable that something that appears fairly trivial on other platforms is apparently nearly impossible to do with AmigaOS. Something that should not be like that with AmigaOS.
KHTML is based in KDE's konqueror browser, but has been ported to Safari and is part of Apple Webcore which is fully documented, open sourced and has a complete API for everyone to use.
And you know what?
- KHTML exists also for SkyOS, a one man created OS.
- KHTML exists now for GTK+ so it can be used in Gnome.
- There's a Win32 port on the way.
It's actually quite portable.
The way Apple Webcore is made is largely the same way KHTML should be ported to AmigaOS. It's highly documented.
We have at aweb.sunsite.dk:
- Complete plans for how to do this.
- A huge amount of documentation on Apple Webcore and KHTML
- CVS access should you require it
- A complete and working bug database
- Direct access to the original KHTML authors (David Faure, etc.) We are allowed to post Amiga specific questions on their 'kfm-devel' mailing list.
- A complete GCC platform for doing the port.
We need one or two dedicated guys who know how to handle GCC and know a bit about C/C++ to study it and do the port.
We expect this to take no longer than six months, if done properly.
After that we can start building kick ass browsers.
Regards,
Henrik Mikael Kristensen
AWeb Development Team
source: This AW Thread
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