WebKit on Windows

I've been working off and on for the past few weeks on getting WebKit to build and run under Windows without requiring any non-redistributable Apple libraries. It's been pretty easy, which is almost completely due to the fact that Apple had this working originally under Cairo. Later, they ported their own amazing CoreGraphics (see their Quartz and Image Kit for some ideas of this great framework) to Windows, and based Safari on it. This has the great advantage of providing nearly per-pixel accuracy on both platforms, resulting in a great user experience.

I have been hoping to strip out Internet Explorer from a product at work, and make use of WebKit instead. Today, I took a big first step by getting their old Spinneret test program to work:



This is no great accomplishment on my part; Apple's engineers had already created all of this infrastructure years ago. They tossed it when their own superior libraries became available. However, since they have not yet seen fit to allow these tools to be redistributed, we mere mortals must base our WebKit hopes on the Cairo back-end. Of course, over the last few years, the GTK+ port has brought the once-buggy Cairo back-end to be nearly per-pixel accurate with the CoreGraphics logic. If all goes well, it may soon be impossible to tell the two apart.

Currently, my own great accomplishment is having commented out the entire text rendering system yielding the entirely blank example of http://webkit.org. But stay tuned -- bigger and better things are to come soon!