Sorry to start a new thread on this but I was on vacation and just now
read the thread on web browsers for directfb.

I have been working on this problem myself and I really think that you
should consider a new approach that I've worked out.

First of all WebKit is quite a viable solution and you should not
discount it. I've worked extensively on both WebKit and Mozilla
mozilla especially for embedded use is simply too large. Next  WebKit
is doing quit well as a real world browser and its ability to handle
most web pages is close to that of gecko. Also gecko  is very
difficult to understand much less modify. Something you need to
consider for smaller devices.

The current crop of web browsers are very much a evolutionary design.
The important thing today is to ask yourself how you would build a
browser today given the current xml technologies you need to support.

Here is my solution.

First start with webkit in particular the  port  
http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/

Next you need to add in the SVG support from the main webkit
repository that's what I plan to do next.

Finally this is the important part of the design. If you build a  good
SVG browser then the rest of the XML display technologies can be build
on top of it. HTML XUL etc etc etc.

You can think of the browser being re-designed to present a document
as a set of layers each layer is its own document.
The bottom layer is the SVG document and dom that can be directly
rendered above this is the  XUL dom that represents  widgets connected
to the SVG dom. Finally if  your rendering HTML the html dom sets
above this.

If you have a SVG capable browser you don't need native widgets. You
can if you choose support native widgets as opaque native svg nodes
but thats and optimization of the design.
Understand that todays browsers are adding SVG late as and add on
consider the reverse and make it core.


Please consider this proposal since I really think with DirectFB we
have a chance to do something innovative and powerful and we bring
higher level technologies to the platform.
Think outside the widget :)

Mike

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