WebKit For Metacity/Mutter CSS Theming?

An anonymous reader writes "As Metacity (the GNOME window manager) evolves into Mutter, the question of CSS themes and how to implement them has come up. One of the proposals was WebKit, which the author asked more specifically about on his blog. It seems that WebKit, being a very fast rendering engine, would allow Mutter to have unprecedented power, not to mention being nearly future-proofed. As a major bonus, going this way could allow GNOME to share themes with KDE, which is apparently already headed towards a dependency on WebKit. Many people will reflexively recoil at the idea of a browser being mixed with a window manager. But it's important to remember that WebKit is not a browser — it's just a rendering engine, and it's not where all the security issues come from. So, what are the real technical issues at stake here? What are the pros and cons of using WebKit underneath GNOME rendering?"

Re:double bubble, toil and trouble

[Arker]

Indeed.

Now webkit isnt a porous mass of malware-friendly hooks like you have on windows, it's true. At least not yet. Nonetheless, sometimes it's best just to accept that the fact you *can* do something stupid like make your window manager depend on an unrelated application, that doesnt mean it's actually a good idea.

WTF? No more CSS?

[mcrbids]

I'm not sure I understand how you start by saying that CSS barely works for the target environment - BILLIONS of web pages are served every day in a (relatively) cross-platform fashion.

Many of these are rather good looking, too.

So I'd have to argue that CSS doesn't work. The areas where CSS is weak consist primarily of CSS specs that have NOT been implemented (*ahem* IE) or implemented in a bone-headed way (*ahem* IE) not in areas of weakness within the CSS spec itself.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about CSS is how trouble-free its implementation has been, and just how smooth the transition actually has been.

Old stuff still basically works, new stuff just basically works better.

But while we're at it, we should also pay homage to KDE, Konqueror, and its many progeny. KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Webkit, which has begat (among too many other web-like to mention) Chrome/Chromium and Safari. And just about everybody who has worked on or with Webkit has raved about its clean design and crisp implementation.

So, we must give kudos to the excellent KDE team who has produced a product that is just now starting to give Mozilla / IE a run for their money, without all the funding by AOL for all those years.

Good job, KDE team!

Re:double bubble, toil and trouble

[collinstocks]

So... Webkit renders html as far as I know. So the proposal seems to be to render the entire Gnome gui by feeding html at it. I hope I'm wrong, because if that is correct then it would be a really goofy way of going about things.

You're wrong, don't worry.

A window manager pretty much manages the window decorations (title bar, borders, et cetera) and window actions (close, maximize, resize, move, roll-up, sticky, always on top, always on bottom, et cetera).

Metacity is a window manager and nothing else. It doesn't handle what is in the windows themselves.

Oh, and their only proposing to use CSS. No HTML.