> sooner or later, someone is going to want to display some HTML (or an actual website!) within their application. We’d really rather not bundle an entire browser engine to accomplish this
I read that and cannot avoid thinking: yeah well, sooner or later someone is going to want to play an MP3 file. Should now all GUI toolkits include multimedia playback support?
Someone is going to want to display and edit a PSD file, does it mean the GUI toolkit should be able to handle the Photoshop file format?
I get where it's going (I've been a GUI developer myself, working with Qt which does include a browser engine), but to be honest I think that already crosses the line from GUI framework to do-it-all framework.
Qt has a reduced version of HTML and CSS that it uses for Widgets styling, which is why you can make words bold, or underlined or whatever, in labels and pretty much everywhere in the GUI. This is very useful to have. Many more basic toolkits include no such functionality, or have a divide between "plain text" widgets, which can do no formatting at all, and a real browser-ish HTML widget. (There's also capital-R-T Rich Text used in some parts of Windows but you really don't want to go there)
I mean yes? Because either the toolkit does it or the platform does it and the toolkit wraps the functionality.
I think it’s easier to flip the script. If you didn’t include the ability for your toolkit to display HTML with a browser widget how do you imagine your user proceeding? I don’t think most end-programmers would be expected to know how to take WebKit and maybe a JS engine and make it into a custom widget in your framework.
I read that and cannot avoid thinking: yeah well, sooner or later someone is going to want to play an MP3 file. Should now all GUI toolkits include multimedia playback support?
Someone is going to want to display and edit a PSD file, does it mean the GUI toolkit should be able to handle the Photoshop file format?
I get where it's going (I've been a GUI developer myself, working with Qt which does include a browser engine), but to be honest I think that already crosses the line from GUI framework to do-it-all framework.