[Development] Assistant WebKit/WebEngine support

[Bastiaan Veelo]

On 25/06/2019 21:30, Konrad Rosenbaum wrote:
>
> It is documentation for developers for crying out loud!
>

No it is not. Assistant is distributed as a help viewer, to be 
distributed along with applications for use by the customers of your 
customers. As soon as QTextBrowser in its current sorry state of 
rendering HTML became the sole supported browser, it completely FAILED 
that purpose. Not just "a little bit more Spartan but we can live with 
it", no, it leaves out *critical* information! It is completely 
undistributable in our case.

Firstly the fonts are a complete mess, with different elements having 
unrelated sizes, weights and types. If you zoom, only the headings zoom!

We use styled <span> to accomplish frames around labels to refer to 
elements in screen shots[1] that vanish in QTextBrowser.

We use CSS styled tables to render hyperlinked menus that occur in the 
user interface, and the borders should be there because they are there 
in the UI; they are not in QTextBrowser. We have hundreds of these menus 
in multiple translations, and screen shots are just not going to work in 
a 400-page manual. Try keeping those up to date. And what about those 
hyperlinks? Don't you dare suggest those HTML 1.0 tables.

We use CSS styles description links to highlight call-outs[2]. They 
don't work in QTextBrowser.

Deciding that it was okay to drop Qt WebKit in Qt Assistant because with 
some tweaking of your content the Qt documentation for Qt developers 
could be made kind of acceptable to some people was a complete let down 
and Qt's biggest mistake so far. Pardon my lingo.

Bastiaan.

[1] 
https://www.sarc.nl/images/manuals/pias/htmlEN/loading_module_gui.html#loading_gui_layout
[2] https://www.sarc.nl/images/manuals/pias/htmlEN/fwy_export.html