[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Rutledge Shawn]

On 3 Feb 2015, at 20:25, André Pönitz <apoenitz at t-online.de> wrote:

> I think the main dependency here is that Qt Creator needs to render Qt
> documentation. What technology this uses is of secondary interest. It
> just needs to be "good enough", and it preferably should not be a lot bigger
> than actually needed for the task.
> 
> WebKit was already a bit of a stretch here, I do not really see WebEngine as
> an improvement in the size and overhead departement. It's a huge club for a
> task that's just a wee bit beyond the QTextBrowser fallback's capabilities
> (which was, btw, working reasonably well for a while about two or three
> years ago, until some change in the doc style sheet made it really ugly
> again).
> 
> Creator would benefit most from a *lightweight* HTML renderer, possibly
> thin wrappers around platforms' native renderers, _or_ a doc style that's
> usable in QTextBrowser, less so from being used as a pawn in the WebKit vs
> WebEngine discussion, both of which are not really good fits for the task.

I agree.  For every kind of documentation in every app which has a help system, and in other use cases where people use real web browsers without needing all the features, it would be great to have a lightweight alternative which has no Javascript, no plugins, and a means to turn off network access.  (It probably needs CSS support though, unfortunately.)  That would be best for the sake of security as well as conserving memory and CPU cycles.

Already, when documentation links to outside web sites, Creator calls up the system browser if you click such a link.  It should stay that way, IMO.