I second Benjamin's call for participation.
Installing the nightly build of WebKit does not affect the OS's use of
Safari x.x as the web viewer in say Mail.app... essentially the
nightly build installs as a standalone browser like Firefox so the
issue of instability is fairly small in that the app will quit but it
does not bring down Mai;app etc.
It is critical that VO user test the builds, because this is where
rubber meets the road beyond where Apple's accessibility frameworks
function—that is the interpretation and presentation of multiple forms
of frequently mal-coded html something Apple has no control over but
it is the domain of WebKits open-source community . This is where
"community" means us! So please signup and and help make WebKit more
than the best html rendering engine out there!
Another great web site for getting insight on the WebKit community is
the the Surfin Safari Blog http://webkit.org/blog/
Cheers
On Jun 19, 2008, at 12:10 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
erik burggraaf wrote:
Debra, have you looked at webkit? It's very closely related to
safari, and it's nightly builds have advanced features safari
doesn't. I tried one and it broke more than it fixed, but one day
I'll try a new one and see if I like it better.
To be more exact, WebKit is the open-source web engine that
underpins Safari and a whole family of minor browsers (e.g. OmniWeb,
iCab, and Shiira on Mac OS X, Epiphany on GNOME, the S60 Browser on
certain Nokia phones). When you install a nightly build of WebKit, a
second instance of Safari, called WebKit, is created in your
Applications folder. This essentially is your current Safari
interface but powered by the nightly build of the web engine.
NightShift is a useful utility for keeping your nightly builds up to
date.
I would strongly encourage VoiceOver users to test WebKit Nightly
regularly and report bugs on the public bugtracker, since bugs not
found will end up in the next release of Safari. It's also a good
place to make feature requests, since it means that people outside
Apple can see and work on them. The WebKit developers have no system
for automating testing the accessibility tree produced by WebKit and
read by VoiceOver. That means they have no automated system for
catching regressions. User testing might have caught multiple select
boxes breaking between Safari 2.1 and 3, for example.
Here's some websites to get you started:
WebKit project home: http://webkit.org/
Guide to reporting bugs: http://webkit.org/quality/reporting.html
NightShift: http://web.mac.com/reinholdpenner/Software/NightShift.html
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
