webkit vs. khtml (mac os desktop vs. kde) ?

[Duncan]

RW posted on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:36:08 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:01:33 -0600 Wood Jeff wrote:
> 
> 
>> so exactly how are webkit and khtml linked? how are they different?
>> is one just a fork or a port of the other?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
> 
>> is the Mac OSX just a variant of KDE or based in part on KDE?
> 
> Nothing to do with KDE.

OSX the OS?  Indeed, nothing to do with KDE the DE.

The webkit rendering engine for their Safari web browser, a single app 
(tho the rendering engine may be leveraged for use with other apps in the 
system) on that OS?  That was indeed forked from KHTML, the rendering 
engine behind konqueror.

I too will refer you (Wood Jeff) to the wikipedia webkit article.  It 
seems accurate based on what I know as of my reading it just now, altho 
any good debater will know the limits of quoting wikipedia and the value 
of quoting other sources as well.  But the wikipedia webkit article's a 
good place to start, and you can follow and quote its references 
directly, if you prefer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

While you're at it, look up khtml as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khtml

And, the google for both terms together should be useful:

http://www.google.com/search?q=webkit+khtml

A few bits that can be found in the references above but that I'd like to 
emphasize:

While initially there was some friction between the Apple/webkit and KDE/
khtml folks, they eventually worked things out and were able to 
cooperate /reasonably/ well.  Altho the coding styles are different and 
they remained separate projects, the kde/khtml devs were able to 
incorporate many of the webkit improvements... improvements that wouldn't 
have been made or that would have taken rather longer had the khtml devs 
had to develop them from scratch.

Qt incorporated webkit into its own qt-webkit module.  Of course, kde is 
qt-based, so that gave kde devs a choice of rendering technology to use.  
At first that was in only relatively light and new code, qt-webkit for 
rendering web content in plasmoids (plasma desktop widgets), for 
instance, but a webkit kpart was developed, and with recent kde with the 
appropriate components installed, it's possible to select either the khtml 
or webkit kparts for konqueror html/web rendering.  (There's also a newer 
and less mature kde browser, rekonq, that's webkit only, AFAIK.)

For kde4 at least, khtml will remain, as it's part of what defines kde4 
and failing to provide it would break compatibility for third party kde4-
based apps.  While I'm not sure what the khtml status is for kde 
frameworks aka kde5, I can certainly speculate. =:^)

I DO know that frameworks is supposed to be MUCH more modular (thus the 
name).  Based on that, while it was previously speculated that khtml may 
be deprecated or phased out in kde5, with the more modular frameworks, 
it's quite possible that it'll remain, but only as an optional framework 
component, pulled in if you're running anything that depends on it, but 
not as part of the much smaller core.

Also note that some of the current kde4 kdelibs functionality will be 
incorporated into qt5, which is supposed to be much more modular as 
well.  So the kde frameworks core should be MUCH smaller, with parts of 
it being incorporated into qt5 while other parts are split off into 
optional components.

It follows that with qt5-webkit becoming stronger and more mature on the 
one hand and the modularization of kdelibs on the other, I personally 
don't see khtml's place in the frameworks core, tho as I said, it's 
likely to remain an optional component, pulled in as an optional or 
mandatory dependency by some kde apps.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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