Weekly Igalia's report on WebKit
Hi webkitters,This weekly report project was supposed to start after the last WebKit hackfest, but my holidays got in between and now I’m recovering of them ;)
Here we go:
In summary, in these last three weeks we have had 15 commits and done 23 reviews.
Martin and Carlos have been working on the authentication mechanisms. Now they can be hooked ,through the web view API, by the applications, which could take control of the dialogues and credentials handling.
Martin has also been dealing with text rendering with complex layouts (such as Arabic). This effort leaded, finally, to the removal of Pango in favor of Harfbuzz.
Now let’s talk about Carlos’ baby monster: the injected bundle patch. As you know, in WebKit2, the engine has been split in two isolated processes the UI and Web processes. The first is in charge of the user interface, and the former deals with HTML, CSS and JavaScript handling. Meanwhile this approach adds more robustness and responsiveness, also imposes more complexity because it is required an IPC mechanism to interact with the Web process. This is particularly hard for accessing to the DOM bindings.
Carlos, since the last year, has been working on his injected bundle patch, which offers a mean to support loading plugins in the web process using injected bundle. Hence, through DBus, an application could load a plugin to communicate, indirectly, with the Web process. This approach is supposed to be the milestone for the DOM bindings in WK2GTK, and also provides a mean to pre-fetch DNS registries. This patch has been happily pushed just recently, in the second week of January.
If this was not enough, Carlos also released the development version of WebKitGTK+ v1.11.4.
Now let us go to the multimedia realm, my favorite land.
Philippe finished the port of his patch for WebAudio support to GStreamer 1.0 as backend. And now he is porting the full-screen support in Gst 0.10 to Gst 1.0 in order to reuse ans share the same base code. Aligned with WebAudio, Philippe is developing a new audio source provider that gathers raw audio data from the MediaPlayer and pipe them into the AudioBus if it is required.
Xabier has been working to deliver a nice and neat HTML5 media controls, using stylable GTK+ controls. And myself, I’m still playing with the audio pitch preservation.
Another great landmark for us is a11y, and here Joanie has been working hard to bring back the accessibility tests on GTK to a sane state. And also keeps her efforts to enable an access to WebKit for Orca.
In other sort of things, Berto has been fighting against a bug on GtkLaunch, which was shown in Epiphany too when displaying only images. Meanwhile, Dape, lurked on spell checking support for Qt WebKit2. And Sergio enabled, by default, the WebP image handling.