KDE Commit-Digest for 16th December 2007

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A Sonnet-based spellcheck runner, and icons on the desktop in Plasma. Continued work revamping KBugBuster, more work towards KDevelop 4. GetHotNewStuff support for downloading maps in Marble. Image and audio dockers in Parley. The start of Glimpse, a new scanning application based on libksane. The beginnings of a generic resource display framework for NEPOMUK. Various work in KHTML. Music Service configuration work, and the integration of last.fm code in Amarok 2.0. Printing work in KOffice. A Sybase database driver for Kexi, panorama work in Krita, and ODF work in KChart. Kompare becomes usable for KDE 4.0, and gets a new maintainer. The confusingly-named game KWin4 is renamed KFourInLine. Trolltech-supported Phonon backends for all major platforms (Quicktime 7, DirectShow 9 and GStreamer) are imported to KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here.

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Comments

by Paul (not verified)

> a "quirk"? that is an interesting understatement for a
> failure at handling a basic CSS 1 property :)

Whatever you want to call it. My point is that web developers will try to work around that failure whereas they won't try to work around KHTML failures or quirks or whatever so KHTML will always need to play catch up and need a couple of years to be able to render high profile websites such as youtube, google mail, yahoo mail or whatever, therefore the need to replace KHTML with webkit which was my point in case you haven't noticed yet :)

by SadEagle (not verified)

>> not to mention the lack of debugger
> wow, you really are not much current with KDE development are you? :)

Current? It's been there since 3.2, from close to 5 years ago. Now, it had its share of problems, as does the current incarnation (the third one, I think), but sucking isn't the same as not existing.

P.S. Do you think we should move the DOM Tree Viewer to kdebase for 4.1, perhaps? I hate it getting stuck in extragear..

by Spart (not verified)

> P.S. Do you think we should move the DOM Tree Viewer to kdebase for 4.1, perhaps?

I'd definetly welcome that... it doesn't get half the care it deserves and it's an important tool.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

Still trying to deny the facts?
Youtube has not just "been worked out recently". We have been using it without any issue for 8-10 monthes at home using KDE 3.5.X. And I'm using Slackware with a prefect vanilla KDE, without any added twicks by the distro that could make KDE break. So try a fresh install or another distro, your settings are obviously faulty but not KHTML rendering.
As for the "principal KDE guys" decision, I haven't read anything yet providing such choice with such clarity. And I'm sure they'll just test and compare before making such fondamental choice, they won't just decide out of whim or religious belief.
For the rest, your view of open source seems really different than mine. Adobe doesn't check if KPDF renders PDF well, does it stop you from using it? BTW, the coming IE8 seems to have passed the Acid2 test, so there's a faire chance that in the future, sites will be more and more standard compliant. So there's not reason to believe KHTML will always play catch-up.
I must say that I don't really feel any empathy with the way you view things. Seems like using your arguments, there would never have been any free software.

by Paul (not verified)

I'm not denying the fact, I'm just saying it doesn't work here (just like gmail, yahoo mail, meebo and everything that has design mode in it), that's why I sent a screenshot to prove my good faith.

Aseigo said numerous time that he wanted webkit though he said let the market make the choice to not piss off the few KHTML devs touchy feelings, so did Zack and distributions are already making that choice: Kubuntu and OpenSuse, the two biggest sponsor and supporter of KDE, the two distro that offer best support for KDE has gone WebKit.

There is one thing you don't seem to get, in web browsers, market share is everything, it doesn't matter (unfortunately) how good a browser render standards. Browsers will always be buggy and will always render some stuff differently from each other and web devs will only test the big browsers out there. So yes, KHTML will always need to play catch up and be a couple of years behind, like it or not. And Acid2 doesn't mean anything, it's just a way to show that the browser handle some errors correctly, even the KHTML devs had said that in the past. Give me CSS2 compliance from IE and fix bugs such as minmax and absolute positioning and we might take them seriously.

Why do you say there wouldn't have been any free software? WebKit is Free Software last time I checked and it's the best out there. Even RMS is saying that keeping developing the HERD is not useful now that we have a better alternative called Linux.

by binner (not verified)

> Kubuntu and OpenSuse, the two distro that offer best support for KDE has gone WebKit.

That's not true, not for openSUSE (the devel distro doesn't contain a WebKit package currently at all) nor Kubuntu (Jonathan said that no decision has been made about this).

by SadEagle (not verified)

> Anyway, aseigo and the principal KDE guys have made it clear that WebKit is
> coming and will replace KHTML so I'm happy and I don't care if you still want >to develop it until death :)

aseigo has no right to make such a statement, since it's not a decision he can make, no matter how many interviews he gives and blog entries he writes. And I don't know who the heck "principal KDE guys" you are speaking of are.

by Segedunum (not verified)

"aseigo has no right to make such a statement, since it's not a decision he can make, no matter how many interviews he gives and blog entries he writes. And I don't know who the heck "principal KDE guys" you are speaking of are."

He certainly does have a right to make that statement, just as you have a right to say that you don't want that to happen by making KHTML better than WebKit in Qt and able to render the vast majority of web sites out there reliably. However, after years of KHTML's *failure* at being able to do that, you and I both know that isn't going to happen. It simply doesn't have the market share behind it for web developers to ever take notice, or the wider development community that WebKit has in order to make that larger market share happen. You can only close so many bugs as 'WONTFIX' asking web developers to change. They won't, and what's more, KHTML doesn't have the browser share clout to do it.

Usage of a particular engine will gravitate to what users use, what works best for KDE's developers and what generates fewer bug reports in the 'this web site doesn't work' department. The odds are, logically speaking, that's going to be WebKit. You have no control whatsoever over what users and KDE's developers actually use I'm afraid.

You're free to denounce WebKit all you like, but it isn't going to make a difference to everyone else or to those facts - no matter how many blog entries and comments you make ;-).

by SadEagle (not verified)

I see that lying to our users is now acceptable. I'll keep it in mind.

by Paul (not verified)

> I see that lying to our users is now acceptable. I'll keep it in mind.

You could also keep in mind that KDE will switch to WebKit, might help some day when you'll end up like XFREE86 devs. They used to be almighty and now those that stayed there just have zero influence and nobody use their stuff anymore. But sure, KHTML is the future, yay...

by Segedunum (not verified)

"I see that lying to our users is now acceptable. I'll keep it in mind."

Whatever. Users and KDE developers will use the rendering engine component that works best on the vast majority of sites out there, without having to do jiggery-pokery with user agents and having to file lots of bugs for stuff that works in IE, Gecko and WebKit.

In terms of your 'users', those are the only 'lies' that matter. No one is denouncing or trying to destroy KHTML.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

Well, you have a problem with your settings as video thumbnails and fullscreen videos have been working for me for monthes. My daughters use it all the time to watch Simpsons and Malcom in the Middle. Maybe you have some remaining old configuration settings in .kde that screw some things, I know I sometimes had such an issue in the past. Or maybe you should use the Flash 9 player if you don't yet, it works quite well for me (well Youtube fullscreen mode, with the resolution and bitrate,... never mind). But it does not seem related to a KHTML issue in itself to me.
As for your reasoning about Adobe+Apple etc., that's the obvious propaganda heard by Zack Rusin and co and it **sounds** reasonable in the first place. But I actually have my doubts about it. Corporate habits are very different from open source ones (except maybe for Trolltech) and making companies work together is often a headache, as each one tries to push their solution that best suits their own needs. Having quite a lot more companies behind it has not helped Gnome being a far more better desktop than KDE, despite all the claims made 5 years ago. It may bring very good things but it can end up an ugly ego and interest mess.
As for WYSIWYG, I used Dreamweaver years ago, but I've been quite happy moving to coding HTML with tools like Quanta recently. WYSIWYG may help people to code their blog, but I don't see it as a mandatory service provided an HTML renderer and it obviously doesn't help you code complicated DHTML pages.

Anyway, I still find surprising your claims that Webkit is "far superior", based apparently on a rather partial experience. Especially when you discard not so "superior" benchmarks that even Apple use.

by Spart (not verified)

> a bunch of people can't keep up against Apple+Adobe+Nokia+Google+trolltech+KHTML creators and they all provide bug
> fixes and features not only platform ports.

Right.. you should read "The Mythical Man-Month". It would explain to you why
your mighty list is completely irrelevant.

We have been 'keeping up' allright since four years without major problems.
The only thing we can't keep up with, to be honest, is the nauseating FUD from
people who are apparently most ennoyed by KHTML's mere existence and have no intention of letting us compete freely.

But lets review together what must amount, if you are right, to an incredible
and steady flow of patches:

> Adobe
made the Apollo fork. Never contributed back anything to Apple. Some developers of the GTK port recently backported a few GTK-painting patches.
Net result: void.

> Nokia
the oldest fork and completely outdated. Only ever contributed a single patch
in two years, which I still haven't decided if it is worth merging.

> Google
forked as part of the Android package. Did not contribute back.

> the KHTML old timers
Georges Staikos contributed a trivial rendering patch, which is wrong and breaks alignment within the fieldset tag.
Lars Knoll didn't contribute anything of general interest to the core.
Zack Rusin didn't contribute to the core.

All this to the best of my knowledge, I'd be happy if you prove me wrong
of course.

> As for youtube, did you try to scroll down the related videos box?

I see you didn't test KHTML from KDE 4 which hasn't any problem of this sort.

> http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/dock/index.svg

great, an academic site demonstrating dynamic SVG. That's useful ;(

See, in the ocean of possible features, implementing everything and the kitchen sink is not necessarily a good plan. It leads to bloat, code duplication, and heavy maintenance burden.

As of now, we have outstanding Canvas support, which is lightweight, and well suited to the kind of task dynamic SVG is supposed to address on the web.

I would happily use a Corba vs. DCOP metaphor here but I'm not completely sure it would still be understood.

Anyway, dynamic SVG as implemented in the Apple tree is a very significant bloat and a great set back for componentization. The rendering engine for HTML+SVG is a monolithic design. We will really have to give a good, long thought to this, supposing dynamic SVG becomes really useful someday.

> http://webkit.org/demos/editingToolbar/

mmh, well the source says it's a tech demo made for FireFox and WebKit only, so of course it's going to work in FireFox and WebKit.
I could also point you to some early Audio object demo and boast that it works only in Opera9 and KHTML4... what's your point?

> KHTML still doesn't support design mode

Yes! That is a fair statement !

It is unfortunate that Leo Savernik, after he put an enormous amount of effort in this, was eventually discouraged to polish his work by the scaring tactics of WebKit supporters.
But, good news ! His code still lives, we are working on it, and the target
for the feature is set to KDE 4.1, which seems just about right given the specification for design mode is still in its early infancy and has not even passed the "editor draft" state.

Merry Christmas to you too.

by Paul (not verified)

Google did make an improvement for WebKit in Android and that involved displaying text before images and making it faster for mobile, I don't have the link of the blog post here but they said they submitted it to the webkit team.

> http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/dock/index.svg
> http://webkit.org/demos/editingToolbar/

Those work for Firefox, Safari and Opera out of the box so KHTML is the only one that doesn't support them.
By the way firefox3 also supports audio and video.

And you do realize that not having design mode make khtml doesn't work with a huge bunch of websites. You know how annoying it is to hear "hey why can't I add smileys to email in yahoo?" or "blogger doesn't work!" or "where's the chat in gmail and gmail??" etc.

Youtube still doesn't work here in KDE4.0 RC2.

Talking about DCOP, if it wasn't for Trolltech, we would still be using it instead of DBUS and I remember many people were bitching about how DCOP rulz and DBUS sucked even though everybody was using it. Now we have much more compatibility and we can share stuff such as tapioca or packagekit, that sounds like webkit by the way :)

Everytime someone comes along and say 'apple does this feature which KHTML doesn't', some KHTML person comes along and say "but the way it is implemented is such a mess, we KHTML devs are working on such a great implementation it's gonna kick ass", well fair enough, that's what they said about design mode 3 years ago.

By the way, why do christians always assume the world celebrates christmas? Half of the world don't, heck half of the world doesn't even know what it is. Do jews say "happy hanouka" to everybody and muslims "col sana ua inta b'kher?".

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

> Talking about DCOP, if it wasn't for Trolltech, we would still be using it instead of DBUS

Higly unlikely. We would be using community maintained bindings like everybody else but we would definitely be using D-Bus.

If not for the outlook of sharing services on the session bus, at least for using the services on the system bus, since we already had been doing this.
Session services has just been the next logical step.

by Spart (not verified)

> Who cares about that benchmark

Apparently Apple cared enough about it to make it prominently appear in a "What's new in WebKit 3" article.

> Anyway, nobody cares about javascript benchmarks.

The nontroppo.org benchmark is not a JavaScript benchmark like Apple's sunspider. It is an independant DHTML benchmark, testing the full JavaScript + DOM + Rendering stack.

> their favorite browser on their favorite website such as gmail, google doc,
> youtube, facebook you name it.

this looks like pointless trolling.
Is your browser named Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari or Opera?

Then I'm afraid it is not actively supported on any of those sites, and will not fare any better than any other unsupported browser.

Things will break and stating otherwise is either delusion or deception.

There is no doubt you can try hard to make things kinda work nevertheless, and fix breakages as fast as you can. But then you really ought to master you engine from top to bottom as we do in KHTML.

by Paul (not verified)

>> their favorite browser on their favorite website such as gmail, google doc,
>> youtube, facebook you name it.

> this looks like pointless trolling.
> Is your browser named Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari or Opera?

Ok, I don't get it. In what way is that trolling? What's wrong with that:

"What users care about is being able to use their favorite browser on their favorite website"

isn't that true? For the matter I use firefox for most things and konqueror some times but less and less unfortunately.
Yes it is true that if I don't use Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari or Opera, then my browser is not supported and this unfortunate situation is not going to change, this is why we need to switch to webkit. You are delusional if you think web designers are going to care about KHTML.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

With this reasoning, you should use Gnome, which has quite a lot more corporate backing than KDE, and Firefox.

by SadEagle (not verified)

Hey now, no reason to bring a fellow OSS project in there. Clearly, if corporate backing is the most important thing, I would suggest using Microsoft Windows.

by Paul (not verified)

no, the most important thing is having the best free software solution, in this case webkit.

by stefan (not verified)

> no, the most important thing is having the best free software solution, in this case webkit.

There are two kind of fools, the one saying: "This is old, and therefore good",
the other saying: "This is new, and therefore better."

by Paul (not verified)

> There are two kind of fools, the one saying: "This is old, and therefore good",
the other saying: "This is new, and therefore better."

There is another kind of fool, the one that think there is only two kinds of fools :p

Seriously, I couldn't care less about what's new or old. I love KHTML and to me, WebKit is just KHTML supported by tons of website with design mode and support for many more websites *on time*. Also the webkit widget TT is working on is really amazing stuff.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

I didn't mean to say anything wrong about Gnome (and actually I don't think my post seemed to imply anything by it), just that if corporate backing was an essential part of choosing open source project over another, Gnome would be the logical choice over KDE.
So when you decide to use KDE anyway, you should not worry about corporate backing and appreciate what the community brings to you.

by binner (not verified)

First webkitpart (part of playground-libs package) is an optional install and second has a lower preference than khtmlpart so it's not "default".

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Hmm, this also seems to happen in the Kubuntu RC2 LiveCD, but not in the KDE4 packages that Kubuntu also provides.

by SVG Crazy (not verified)

Just a question ...

Completely out of topic but I will ask it anyway...

Today I read and article at

http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=150

which shows the possibility to use OpenGL to actually enrich the user interface using GTK+.

It seems that GTK+ people are a little reluctant about these changes:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071028-making-linux-application-u...

Is it possible to make such things with QT Toolkit (and , of course, make these cool things work on KDE)?

I know plasma applets are OpenGL and ARGB compatible (plasma rocks). But I don't know if we could do it in the Qt4 widgets themselves (tabs, buttons, etc).

An example:

Make the Dolphin window translucent and its control widgets (buttons, comboboxes etc) animated by OpenGL.

Sorry for my English, still learning...

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

> Is it possible to make such things with QT Toolkit

we've able to mix argb visuals, gl, etc within apps for quite a while in Qt. plasma wouldn't work very well otherwise =)

by Eike Hein (not verified)

You might be interested in this comment that I wrote in response to another Ars article about Mueller's GTK+ OpenGL work the other day, with regard to how Qt stacks up in comparison (short teaser: very well): http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/620009729...

by SVG Crazy (not verified)

WOW, it seems that there will be a really interesting and exciting future for KDE!

Thanks for the answer...

by Apple Pie (not verified)

Why not call it Konnect4?

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I believe it's to avoid trademark troubles.

by gerd (not verified)

What is the diff between
gdesklets
and
Plasma?

by SVG Crazy (not verified)

In a simple and fast way to say...

gdesklets are only desktop widgets.

Plasma is the whole desktop, with panels, applets, datasources and more.

by Luis (not verified)

The comparative is ridiculous, Plasma is a lot more than GDesklets/SuperKaramba/Screenlets/Kdesktop/Kicker/Dashboard (this is one is by itself a lot better than the others too)/etc