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Re: VPL Mode
by Eric Laffoon on Sunday 30/Nov/2003, @22:37
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> Looks great!!
Thanks!
> I'm looking forward to this. I know a lot of windows people are awaiting something like this, too. Looks like they're gonna get even more than they hoped for :)
Well I hope so... Of course I've been hoping they'd stop waiting and join the development team but I'm ever the optimist. ;-)
> My curiosity raises a couple of technical questions, though: is the VPL capable of handling everything? I guess what I'm asking is... is it a hack? Are there any fundamental limits on what it can do, or can it keep up with new css features, etc? It's built on konqueror with a few new hooks, right?
Yeah... a hack. Shhh! :-O Hey you'd really have to look at what it is to answer your question. It's basically subclassing khtml using a new public interface and adding new user interfaces to integrate with Quanta's infrastructure. That probably doesn't answer the question for a lot of people either. KHTML is the engine the renders web pages in Konqueror. It's being extended with a public interface, which means in non programming terms that what we're doing will become codified and protected so functionality won't be broken or lost in an upgrade. The capabilities are an extention of what Quanta can already do as well as new functionality that's specific to the issues of visually editing markup. The simple answer to your question is that it is not theoretically limited however the first release will have some practical limitations in implementation because it just takes time. For static pages it will be nearly identical to preview but some of the things done for visual queues will make it appear very slightly different.
Our objective is to step beyond accepted behaviors and performances and ask how we might accomplish tasks that need to be done instead of just assuming they are all being done the best way already. In this regard capabilities and limitations of editing and rendering become two different sets. Depending on your task you may want visual perfection or you might want visual feedback that is not part of the actual render.
> What about server-side debugging etc? Is that in there, or is it planned? Server-side python would blow me away (even more ;), although I realise that's unlikely :)
Server side preview is already there regardless of your programming language or module. This enables review of dynamic content in preview. Any use of this in VPL is an incredibly complex proposition as it becomes an intermediary layer that is absurdly difficult to make bi-directional changes on. However for debugging we are working on a generic debugger interface that can easily be extended for plugging in any debugger. Right now it works with Xdebug and Gubed for PHP. This will tightly integrate with Quanta so that debugging is intuitive and fully featured. We hope to be able to introduce in in a future BE very soon but it was not yet stable enough at this time. If you can recommend a Python debugger and especially if we have a developer or at least a very good tester we could make headway there.
> Finally... any rough estimates on when I can play with this in debian? :)
Now if you want to build from source. ;-) If someone knows who the Debian maintainer is now for KDE please have him get in touch with me. It appears Ben is no longer the guy. I've been in touch with the Gentoo maintainer and we are looking at having a BE build for it probably right after beta 2 arrives. |
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