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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: Gecko
From:       David Faure <david () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2000-04-06 9:12:40
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On Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 11:31:04AM +0200, Frédéric LEUBA wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I think you all know about Gecko.
> My question is simple: Is it planned to use Gecko engine into Kde and more \
> specially Konquetor ?
Nope :-)

> Gecko is opensource, it supports all latest standards from the W3C, it is pretty \
> fast and light and very modular.

KHTML is opensource, supports all latest standards from the W3C,
is pretty fast, and light, and very modular. ;-))

> Wouldn't it be a great idea to integrate it into the KDE core,
Probably not.

> it is waste of time to reinvent the wheel.
Neither.
It is usually much longer and painful to try an adapt something developed
by other people, then there is the problem of duplication (maintaining
both versions up to date, trying to get the changes into it, etc.),
and it's much less fun.

Lars, Antti and a few others are doing a wonderful job on KHTML.
I'm sure they would have much less fun trying to integrate Gecko.

I know the concept of "code reuse" is very much into every user's head,
but previous experience have proven to be a hell.

- kvt, based on rxvt, was a nightmare and has been dropped (for konsole)
- I'm not sure if kfm was based on xfm code (?), but it's dead too
- kdvi is still a hell to maintain
- talk with Laurent about kchart, which is based on an existing chart engine
  whose name I forgot : it's unmaintainable, unextensible, etc. Awful.
- The maintainers of the KOffice filters decided against using wvWare for
  the exact same reasons.

You may think it's a waste of time, but people prefer spending their time
on developing something the way they want (and for KDE it means object
code, very modular, as much documented as possible, Unicode-aware - which
is usually missing in existing c programs -, ...) instead of trying to
integrate and maintain some code written elsewhere, often in c, and without
the same standards, which in the end takes _more_ time.

Now we really need to get that web site up, so that people can see
what konqueror can do already ;)

PS: out of interest, does gecko support unicode and bidirectionality ?

-- 
David FAURE
david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://home.clara.net/faure/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today


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