Ars Technica sat down today to talk with KHTML developer and Trolltech employee, Lars Knoll. We talked about his involvement in the project that ultimately became the HTML rendering engine for Apple's Safari web browser, as well how Apple's involvement has shaped the future of web browsing for browsers on just about every platform imaginable.
Lars started the KHTML project as we know it in the late 90s to provide an HTML rendering component for the (then) newly-released KDE 2.0. Over the years, work was done steadily to improve the project, and when Apple decided to create their own browser in 2002 and release it in 2003, KHTML became the basis of their work.
As is somewhat well known, Apple's initial involvement in the open-source project known at KHTML was tense. KHTML developers like Lars were frustrated with Apple's bare-bones commitment to contributing their changes back to the project. "It was hard, and in some cases impossible to pick apart Apple's changes and apply them back to KHTML," he told us. Lars went on to say, "This kind of development is really not what I wanted to do. Developers want to spend their time implementing new features and solving problems, not cherry picking through giant heaps of code for hours at a time."
Over time, Apple spend significant resources to retool their relationship with KHTML and the open-source community in general by making the Webkit project an open-source one. It was complete with an anonymous CVS repository, a full history of changes from Apple's very first involvement in the project, a comprehensive web site with Bugzilla bug tracking, blog, mailing lists, IRC channel, and information for developers if they would like to help the project in any capacity. "The Webkit project is now is almost as near to a full-fledged open source as a project can be," Lars told us. At this point, there are multiple teams in addition to Apple, KDE, and Trolltech working on the rendering engine who all have a stake in its development, continued improvement, and success.
Over the past year, the Webkit team has reversed a lot of the Apple-specific changes that were initially made to the code base and implemented platform-specific abstraction layers to make committing the core rendering code to other platforms significantly easier. Lars cited the WWDC 2007 announcement by Steve Jobs that Apple would be distributing a version of Safari for Windows XP and Windows Vista as a direct result of these changes. Oddly enough, these very changes have led to the possibility that KDE will switch to the Webkit engine in its desktop software as opposed to a pure KHTML solution. Lars said that essentially the saga of KHTML has come full circle, through Apple's and others' hands, and has arrived back at the KDE camp with a number of great improvements and enhancements.
As for the impact that Webkit will have on the future, we've already seen Nokia create a web browser for their series 60 phones based on the project. Lars, who is involved in the Qt project at Trolltech, told us that they're looking at using Webkit as the basis of their embeddable web component in the Qt application framework which will bring Webkit to a whole host of platforms, including Trolltech's Qtopia, an embeddable software stack for mobile devices running Linux.
We asked Lars, who sat in on his first WWDC this past Monday, what he saw that was most compelling. "I really thought the backup solution was great," he said. Lars was also very interested in CoreAnimation, as TrollTech's Qt framework has a similar project that they will be expanding over time. "CoreAnimation will give us a lot of great ideas to help build our version of this technology in the future."
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