Konqueror Compatibility Team proposal

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

Hi Jesse

On Wednesday 16 August 2006 02:46, Jesse Hannah wrote:
> 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.
>
Sounds like a really good idea. We already have many bugs in bugzilla marked 
as [site-issue], but what is really needed are people capable of extracting 
small test-cases from the buggy websites, if a bug doesn't have a test-case 
the KHTML developers often just ignore the bug.
Sometimes these [site-issue] bugs are closed as INVALID or WONTFIX if it's a 
quirk or bug we don't want to implement, we _hope_ the original bug-reporter 
then takes the issue to the site author, but it might be better if we had 
someone dedicated to take the interesting ones (high profile webpages) to the 
authors.


> 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.
>
This is probably harder. To get in contact with Google is more or less 
impossible, and the response so far have been that they don't have the 
resources but would like to hire someone working KHTML compatibility.

> 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.
>
We also need people who can write web-developer documentation of KHTML; what 
works and how. 
There has been some talk about automatic workarounds for buggy websites, such 
as UA-spoofing. If we create such a system, we also need people to maintain 
it.

So I think you are right, there is lots of KHTML task for people who know web 
development but doesn't need to know C++.

Welcome :)
`Allan