[Development] Though about rich text (html, WebView) rendering

Fabrice Salvaire fabrice.salvaire at orange.fr
Thu Feb 25 13:33:00 CET 2016


Dear all,

I am investigating to port a content server to an off-line mobile 
application in order to don't rely to a network connection at all. Thus 
I have to port a database, a kind of web framework, a template engine 
and a rendering engine. I believe it can be a use of case of Qt on 
mobile platform.

If we consider HTML is the right way to display rich text there is 
actually to solution with Qt : Text for basic HTML and WebView for a 
full compliance. I am not sure to understand why we cannot use WebEngine 
on mobile platform. WebEngine seems more interesting since it provides 
WebChannel hooks.

I succeed to hack the WebView using the loadingChanged signal in order 
to simulate a dynamic HTML framework, i.e. call loadHtml according to 
the url. But I don't known if it is the right way to achieve this. Maybe 
we can extend the Java wrapper for this purpose? The fact the rendering 
surface is a light web browser behind the scene can be disturbing since 
it doesn't integrate very well with the QML application.

I think there is something evil since a Web engine is a concurrent of 
QML. We can render math formulas out of the box using a QML WebView and 
mathjax, but we can also implement a full application using HTML5 and 
javascript. Thus use a stack over a stack ...

What is the future plan and advices for this topic?

Fabrice




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