[Mlview-hacking] croco xml/css project news

[Dodji Seketeli]

Hi all,

Well, I think I should kick my ass to regularly write
a "code-oriented-newsletter" that highlights the path
libcroco's project is taking. This is only for the sake
of leting you guys know what the heck is going on ...
I cc this mail also to the mlview dev list because libcroco
is also a subproject of mlview.


Well, I have pushed a couple of bits in the cvs this week.

1/A first version of some css font selection properties.

The CRBoxView widget (The widget on top of the layout engine
that knows how to render an xml document given the style
information found in css stylesheets) now supports the
following css2 font selection properties:
font-size, font-style, font-family, and font-weight.
The other font selection properties are not supported yet.

2/More code to support the parsing of _parts_ of a css stylesheet.
Initially, the parser was designed to have a single public
parsing entry point: the parse_stylesheet () method.

But experience has shown that the ability of parsing only
parts of the stylesheet (say, declarations, rulesets, selectors etc ...)
can be usefull and providing explicit support for this could be worth 
it. I have started to modify the api of the parser so that the internal
facilities available to parse parts of the stylesheet could be made 
public and callable in an asynchroneous manner. I wonder if this could
have been possible if libcroco's parser was based on flex/bison.

3/More stability improvement.


My main focus is on the rendering at the moment. I think this is the 
most important thing. I don't really want to spend too much
time in lower level stuffs because they keep me away from the core of 
the fight which is: provide editing capabilities to CRBoxView and
use CRBoxView in mlview to edit xml documents in a styled way.
This would definitely be a nice feature.

Think about it a little bit: if you provide an xhtml stylesheet
to the system, your editor (say mlview) would be magically transformed
into an xhtml (almost) wysiwyg editor. Just drop a docbook css 
stylesheet in the system and boom, you have a wysiwyg docbook editor.
All this being magically possible thanks to the power of css...

Oh my, this would really rock :)
For those of you who think this is not possible, just get the cvs 
version of libcroco, compile it and launch the tests/test7 binary.
It is a test program of the CRBoxView widget... (Maybe I should
rename this widget into GtkXMLCSSView) . What you see is the rendering
of an rss xml newsfeed. The xml document and it associated stylesheet 
are embededd in the source code of test7 namely tests/test7-main.c .
Just have a look at it...


Well, this is all for this week. I don't think I can stand the weekly
pace for this newsletter but I think it could be something usefull to
push something like this on an almost-regular basis.

If you think it is useless, just let me know.


Cheers,

Dodji.

--

homepage              : http://www.seketeli.org/dodji
gnome xml editor      : http://www.freespiders.org/projects/gmlview
gnome css2 toolkit    : http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libcroco