Konqueror Compatibility Team proposal

[Jesse Hannah]

Hello all,

I'm not a mailing list subscriber or much of a developer, but I am looking for 
people to join and/or support the creation of a team whose focus is to 
communicate with webmasters and companies whose web sites aren't currently 
compatible with Konqueror to help to make Konqueror more widely compatibile 
and usable. Essentially how it would work is, the team looks for and 
identifies Konqueror-specific compatiblity issues with web sites, notifies 
the Konqueror developers and the owners and developers of the site, and works 
together with the two to help make the site fully Konqueror compatible.

One example of this is Gmail, Google Calendar, and the other such Google 
products. To get Gmail to work in the first place with the regular version 
requires changing the browser identification for the domain to Firefox, IE, 
or something like that (Konqueror isn't identified by Gmail, so it defaults 
to the plain HTML view); and even then there are a number of display and 
other problems such as with the chat feature and text overlapping in various 
places. I sent a support ticket to Google listing these problems; I haven't 
heard back from them about it, but this is an example of one thing that the 
Compatibility Team would do: work with both Google and the Konqueror/KHTML 
developers to identify where the problems are and what needs to be done to 
solve them, and get Google to add Konqueror to the list of browsers that 
support the full version of Gmail.

One thing that probably would be ideal for people interested in joining 
(outside of this list, since I'm sure most of you already meet this) is a 
fairly high level of experience in web design, HTML and Javascript, because 
I've noticed that that's where a lot of compatibility errors occur; some 
problems could be fixed on the Konqueror/KHTML side, some could be fixed in 
the coding of the site itself. That's why something like this team is 
necessary: to establish communication between the site and renderer 
developers to see what can be done to make Konqueror as widely compatible a 
web browser as possible, and it would be great if the members of the 
Compatibility Team themselves were able to help identify the actualy causes 
of some or most of the various compatibility problems.

I personally would rather use Konqueror than Firefox in KDE for all-purpose 
web browsing, but there are enough things that don't work quite right in 
Konqueror, or even in Konqueror with a browser identification mask, that 
right now I only use Firefox. However, probably a large number of those 
compatibility issues could be fixed as a result of communication between the 
Konqueror/KHTML developers and the web developers, and to initiate and assist 
in the communication process would be the overall objective of this team.

Any and all comments/questions/ideas/criticism (short of flaming) are more 
than welcome.

Hoping to hear some feedback,
Jesse Hannah.
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