Ars technika at WWDC: Interview with Lars Knoll, creator of KHTML
Ars technika sat down to talk with a Trolltech employee, as well as KHTML developer Lars Knoll. We talked about his participation in the project, which ultimately became the HTML rendering engine in Apple's Safari browser, as well as how Apple participated determined the future of web browsing across all platforms.
Lars started his project in the late 90s. The goal of the project was to present the HTML rendering engine for the upcoming release of KDE 2.0. Over the years, much has been done to improve the project and, when Apple decided to make its own browser in 2002, it was KHTML that was taken as the basis. Apple's browser release came out in 2003.
Apple’s initial involvement in the open source project did not go well. KHTML developers, such as Lars, had to make changes proposed by Apple back into the project. It was difficult, and at some moments not at all possible. Lars said that such a development is not what he wants. The developers wanted to spend their time on developing new functions and solving existing problems, and not on tweaking the code hook.
Over time, Apple spends a lot of effort on redefining relationships in the KHTML development team and the open source community. The result of these efforts was that the Webkit project also became an open source project. An anonymous CVS repository was opened, a list of changes was published, starting with the very first versions. There was also a site with Bagzila, a blog, mailing lists, an IRC channel. For the developer who wanted to help the project, numerous information was available. Now this project is as open as possible. At the moment, in addition to Apple, Trolltech and KDE, there are many groups involved in the development and interested in its further development and improvement.
')
Over the past year, the Webkit team has done a good job of ridding the code of platform dependency. This makes it possible to simply transfer the engine core to other platforms. Lars said that the announcement at WWDC 2007 by Steve Jobs, the Safari browser for Windosw XP and Windows Vista, is a direct consequence of the changes that have been made. Curiously, these changes led to the possibility that KDE could switch to the Webkit engine instead of using pure KHTML. Lars says that the KHTML history has come full circle and now all changes have returned to KDE, bringing with it many innovations and improvements.
As for the future impact of Webkit, we have already seen the mobile browser, created by Nokia, for its phones on the Series 60 platform. Lars, who is involved in the QT project in Trolltech, says that they are going to use Webkit as the basis for their embedded Internet component in QT. This will extend Webkit to a large number of platforms, including Trolltech Qtopia - the embedded software stack, for mobile devices running Linux.
We asked Lars what he thought was most convincing at his first WWDC. “I really think the idea of ​​a backup plan is great,” he said. He was also very interested in CoreAnimation, as Trolltech has a similar project within QT, which they will expand with time. “CoreAnimation will give us a lot of ideas that will help create our version of this technology in the future.”
PS Enough free translation of a person who barely knows English.
Lars started his project in the late 90s. The goal of the project was to present the HTML rendering engine for the upcoming release of KDE 2.0. Over the years, much has been done to improve the project and, when Apple decided to make its own browser in 2002, it was KHTML that was taken as the basis. Apple's browser release came out in 2003.
Apple’s initial involvement in the open source project did not go well. KHTML developers, such as Lars, had to make changes proposed by Apple back into the project. It was difficult, and at some moments not at all possible. Lars said that such a development is not what he wants. The developers wanted to spend their time on developing new functions and solving existing problems, and not on tweaking the code hook.
Over time, Apple spends a lot of effort on redefining relationships in the KHTML development team and the open source community. The result of these efforts was that the Webkit project also became an open source project. An anonymous CVS repository was opened, a list of changes was published, starting with the very first versions. There was also a site with Bagzila, a blog, mailing lists, an IRC channel. For the developer who wanted to help the project, numerous information was available. Now this project is as open as possible. At the moment, in addition to Apple, Trolltech and KDE, there are many groups involved in the development and interested in its further development and improvement.
')
Over the past year, the Webkit team has done a good job of ridding the code of platform dependency. This makes it possible to simply transfer the engine core to other platforms. Lars said that the announcement at WWDC 2007 by Steve Jobs, the Safari browser for Windosw XP and Windows Vista, is a direct consequence of the changes that have been made. Curiously, these changes led to the possibility that KDE could switch to the Webkit engine instead of using pure KHTML. Lars says that the KHTML history has come full circle and now all changes have returned to KDE, bringing with it many innovations and improvements.
As for the future impact of Webkit, we have already seen the mobile browser, created by Nokia, for its phones on the Series 60 platform. Lars, who is involved in the QT project in Trolltech, says that they are going to use Webkit as the basis for their embedded Internet component in QT. This will extend Webkit to a large number of platforms, including Trolltech Qtopia - the embedded software stack, for mobile devices running Linux.
We asked Lars what he thought was most convincing at his first WWDC. “I really think the idea of ​​a backup plan is great,” he said. He was also very interested in CoreAnimation, as Trolltech has a similar project within QT, which they will expand with time. “CoreAnimation will give us a lot of ideas that will help create our version of this technology in the future.”
PS Enough free translation of a person who barely knows English.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/31108/
All Articles