[dot] Next Generation KDE Technologies Ported to WebCore

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1121021917/

From: Kurt Pfeifle <pfeifle at kde.org>
Dept: embraced-by-Apple
Date: Sunday 10/Jul/2005, @13:58

Next Generation KDE Technologies Ported to WebCore
==================================================

   After sucessfully using KHTML [http://khtml.info] and KJS
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KJS] as cornerstone technologies to build
their much praised Safari web browser
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)], Apple engineers
have now made the first steps to adopt the next generation of KDE's web
technology into their WebCore rendering engine.  Apple
[http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/] developer Eric
Seidel was proud to announce the introduction of experimental SVG
support into WebCore
[http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2005-July/000273.html]:
"Over the last few months I ported KDE's new DOM
[http://www.w3.org/DOM/] architecture 'KDOM' as well as their Scaleable
Vector Graphics (SVG [http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/]) implementation
'KSVG2' and render tree library 'KCanvas' to WebCore."

     There is no SVG [http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/] support in Safari
itself yet, but the chances of KDE 4's SVG technology being used by
Safari and Mac OS X have been greatly increased by this move. There is
now a special section devoted to SVG
[http://webkit.opendarwin.org/projects/svg] on the WebCore
[http://webkit.opendarwin.org/] site.

     KDOM and KSVG2 are slated to be moved into the core of KDE 4.  With
Apple including the technology into WebCore, this means that several
Safari engineers will be now be working full-time with
KDOM/KSVG2/KCanvas. Eric Seidel's KSVG2 contributions can already be
found directly committed to the KDE Subversion repository. Given that
Apple has recently improved the accessibility of WebCore development to
KDE hackers by moving it to an open bug tracking
[http://tinyurl.com/bspue] system and a publicly viewable CVS
[http://webkit.opendarwin.org/building/checkout.html] server, this is
good news for KHTML hackers.

     KDE core developers Nicolas Zimmermann ("WildFox") and Rob Buis
("rwlbuis") have been working [http://svg.kde.org/introduction.php]
rather silently, but hard on a new DOM implementation
[http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdenonbeta/kdom/] for nearly 2 years. KDOM
is intended to be much more extendable (MathML
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML] comes to mind) than the current
DOM technology used by Konqueror, and will make it easy to build in any
future W3C [http://www.w3.org/] standard. A sketched out design document
for interested developers can be found in KDOM's repository.
[http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdenonbeta/kdom/docs/WHYKDOM.txt?&view=markup]

     It looks like KDE 4 is already well on track to establish itself as
the leading implementation and development platform for current and
future web technologies.