WebKit For Metacity/Mutter CSS Theming?

An anonymous reader writes "As Metacity (the GNOME window manager) evolves into Mutter, the question of CSS themes and how to implement them has come up. One of the proposals was WebKit, which the author asked more specifically about on his blog. It seems that WebKit, being a very fast rendering engine, would allow Mutter to have unprecedented power, not to mention being nearly future-proofed. As a major bonus, going this way could allow GNOME to share themes with KDE, which is apparently already headed towards a dependency on WebKit. Many people will reflexively recoil at the idea of a browser being mixed with a window manager. But it's important to remember that WebKit is not a browser — it's just a rendering engine, and it's not where all the security issues come from. So, what are the real technical issues at stake here? What are the pros and cons of using WebKit underneath GNOME rendering?"

Comments

Something compiled?

[ickleberry]

Would it not be better to use a compiled, binary version of CSS for this sort of thing to reduce the overhead. I know its fashionable these days to do everything over HTTP and inside a browser but it's just a fad. Everybody knows it sucks from a design / efficiency point of view (unless you are an expensive coffee drinking, iPhone toting meeja student with messy hair who lives in a big city).

I'm not going to waste my time writing a detailed rant about why you shouldn't use a freaking browser rendering engine to draw your GUI for you because thanks to the openness of Linux I will just be able to load one of 10's of other, infinitely faster window managers. KDE4 has already become far too bloated and unresponsive for my liking and it looks like GNOME will be next, maybe XFCE after that but other minimalist window managers will be created to fill the niche left behind by those who fell victim to the awful disease that is feature creep.

I have nothing against features that are actually useful, but this is just extra fluff we don't need

Re:Power and future-proofing?

[A12m0v]

moving from GTK+ to WebKit could be what it takes to save GNOME