Current status of the xwidget branch

Current status of the xwidget branch

[joakim]

[ Last time I wanted some feedback I merged to master, and that didn't
go too well, as an understatement.

In the future  I will instead send a status email. I can attach the patch too,
but interested people can just as well generate the diff from the
branch. ]

The most interesting thing with the xwidget branch is that it allows
to embed an webkit browser widget inside an Emacs buffer.

Recently this has been improved so that its usable for day to day browsing.
While that was never really the intended use, its a good measurement of stability.

A summary of recent changes:

- native scrolling inside webkit was implemented. This makes all the
  difference for stability

- Paul Eggert helped me fix a lot compiler warnings

- Eli Zaretski helped me fix some subtle display engine issues,
  notably bidi support

- Some gtk runtime warnings was fixed

What remains before a new merge attempt:

- Since the history of the branch has been found to be more or less
  useless, I intend to generate a patch that can be applied to master,
  rather than merging.

- Someone other than me should apply the patch, as a safety measure.

- Apply more of Paul Eggerts formatting patch

- Write proper changelogs. I find this actually quite daunting.
My current attempt is in README.xwidget

- ifdef some experimental code that will be useful in the future

- Remove some code that is no longer useful. 

For instance, there is support for a slider widget, that doesn't use
offscreen rendering, but offscreen rendering works so well now with
the webkit widget, I'm going to remove all other methods.  There is
also a POC Cairo widget that wasn't finished and so on.

-- 
Joakim Verona

Re: Current status of the xwidget branch

[raman]

Would it also  be possible to manipulate the DOM  from the Lisp side?
Would make for interesting use-cases.

Webkit implements the debugger API so the other way to do this is to
talk to that API  and get a copy of the DOM to parse via libxml on the
Emacs side 

Re: Current status of the xwidget branch

[joakim]

raman <raman@google.com> writes:

> Would it also  be possible to manipulate the DOM  from the Lisp side?
> Would make for interesting use-cases.
>
> Webkit implements the debugger API so the other way to do this is to
> talk to that API  and get a copy of the DOM to parse via libxml on the
> Emacs side 

Yes it is possible, and some of that is already done in the branch.

However, at the moment I will focus on simplifying the patch so that it
can be merged to master.


-- 
Joakim Verona

Re: Current status of the xwidget branch

[raman]

Understood. But I look forward to this being in trun, and kudos and
thanks in advance for all the work.