I posted earlier about adding an ifdef for the Google-URL library in KURL.h. I thought I would also explain the current thinking on the long term plans, which a number of people have expressed concern about. The current ifdef approach is an incremental way for us to move forward, both with out merge of forked WebCore files, and toward a more unified URL handling infrastructure.
We are open to a wide variety of solutions. We have a requirement that we can use the same backend for our application-layer URL handling without adding WebKit types. It would need to have two modes: a 16-bit character mode for web pages, and an 8-bit character mode for interpreting network traffic. Where the code lives and what format the code is in are less important. I think the best goal to have at this point that satisfies everybody's requirements is that there be an interface layer that KURL uses. This interface would basically be the url_canon and url_parse interfaces in Google-URL. The initial implementation of these interfaces would be the Google-URL code, and they would live in some directory inside WebKit in the WebKit coding style. This code would have no WebCore, WTF, or STL types in it. Applications like Chromium could (if they wanted)) implement their own URL objects on top of this interface, just like KURL would be implemented on top of it. Other applications could also use this code without taking a dependency on WebKit (there has been some interest expressed about Google-URL for this reason). This is basically splitting the current library into two, along layers which are already designed into it (with the exception of one std::vector in url_util.cc which is a bug). The current Google-URL project would likely be abandoned. The WebKit community currently has little knowledge about this library today. Predicting the final outcome will be impossible until the community has some experience with this code. They may find that the code or approach of the library is unacceptable, and we'll have to find another way forward. Assuming that the Google-URL library is largely seen as an improvement to the codebase by the WebKit community, what I have outlined here would be a perfectly acceptable solution to us. Brett _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
