Re: Inquiries About The LibDom Library

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 20:13:45 +0000, Pascal Archambault wrote:
> I am an undergrad student currently working on a project aiming to supplement
> NetSurf's javascript capabilities. I am still at a learning stage, so if the
> following doesn't make sense please try to bear with me.

That's an interesting goal, and we'd be pleased to have you contribute
usefully.

> I have been exploring the code of the netsurf project and the libdom library,
> and as such, I had a some questions:
>
> 1. What is the current status of the libdom project and who is in charge
> of it ?

libdom is currently in a bit of a mess to be honest. We wrote it initially to
levels 1 and 2 of DOM and some of 3 of HTML. Then it sat quietly for a while
before we started adding support for HTML5's DOM behaviours.

We don't have an "in charge" person because we're a collaborative team with
not-enough time on our hands :-) I'd say that John-Mark (jmb) knows the most
about the core of libdom, but I have been doing quite a bit of the recent
updates to it.

> 1. I see that netsurf's core dom support is standing at Level 3 DOM, are
> there any plans for the libdom library to follow the W3C DOM4
> recommendations ? and as such, by contributing to libdom should I try to
> stick to the Level 3 DOM spec or aim for the DOM4 specs ?

If you want to contribute to libdom in a way which will be useful for JS
support going into the future, then the first thing we need to do is to
implement and complete the core forms behaviours into libdom so that we can
migrate NetSurf away from its current monstrous forms code.

You can see some of what needs to be done if you look at recent(ish) developer
weekend notes, particularly the notes I made last September:
http://wiki.netsurf-browser.org/developer-weekend/sep-2017/#newapproach

Good luck, and please do feel free to pop up on our IRC channel to chat.

D.

--
Daniel Silverstone http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
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