HTML rendering is hard

20 April, 2009

wxWidgets is a nice, easy-to-use cross platform toolkit for writing desktop applications. It exists for many different languages including Ruby and Python.

It includes an HTML renderer.

On Windows this uses the IE renderer.
On OSX it uses the webkit renderer.
On Linux it uses, er, some code that this guy wrote, y’know? It doesn’t support CSS.

This means that my desktop aggregator does not work very well on Linux, which is currently my primary use case.

It’s possible to use wxMozilla but that was seemingly abandoned in 2005.

It’s possible to use wxWebkit but the instructions for that start with “check the source of webkit out of svn” and ends with “the Python bindings don’t work yet”.

GTK is an easy-to-use toolkit for writing desktop applications. It is nominally cross-platform (but I wouldn’t want to push the matter). It can use WebKitGtk.

I appear to be at a frustrating fork in the road.

See other posts tagged with general wxvenus wxwidgets and other posts made in April 2009.

Comments

Jeff Schiller

20 April, 2009 at 19:57

I can’t imagine you gave Qt a try and didn’t like it :), so I must assume you didn’t use it for another reason…

Phil

20 April, 2009 at 20:09

My excellent reason was that I forgot it existed 🙂

My last experience of coding QT was 2002 sometime when it was still license-only. You’re right, I should absolutely take a look, although I have to admit that Glade is a very nice GUI creator for those writing their UI for the second-time around 😉

Jeff Schiller

20 April, 2009 at 20:11

Phil – trust me once you try Qt 4.5 you will not go back – particularly when using QtCreator (Trolltech’s IDE with GUI-builder)

Hoàng Đức Hiếu

21 April, 2009 at 01:20

If you use LoadPage, try XEmbedding a QtWebKitGTK window.

Mike Nolan

21 April, 2009 at 01:22

Just write your own rendering engine…?