[Development] Assistant WebKit/WebEngine support

[Eike Ziller]

> On Jun 28, 2019, at 10:56, Palaraja, Kavindra <KPalaraja at luxoft.com> wrote:
> 
> On 28.06.19, 10:24, "Eike Ziller" <Eike.Ziller at qt.io> wrote:
> 
>> On 27. Jun 2019, at 15:46, Palaraja, Kavindra <KPalaraja at luxoft.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 27.06.19, 10:47, "Development on behalf of Jaroslaw Kobus" <development-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of Jaroslaw.Kobus at qt.io> wrote:
>> 
>> QTextBrowser promises to render rich text - isn’t it what we want for showing help? If QTextBrowser isn’t able to render properly the static help files - what is the other typical usage of it? Why we claim that QTextBrowser is able to do things, which in fact it can't? This doesn't show a fair message to the user, if we - for our purposes - don't use tools which we should.
>> ....
>> 
>> OK, if we can't use QTextBrowser, then what are our other options?
>> 
> 
> ......
> 
>    Again, I’m not in principle against the above functionality,
>    but I don’t want us to pay the price that is imposed by a full-blown QtWebEngine. If we cannot severely strip that down, that price is much higher than necessary for HTML+CSS, and even for HTML+CSS+JavaScript.
> 
> 
> To clarify, you are not against better functionality in how Creator displays documentation. But:
> 
> * It can't be QTextBrowser, because it's not a full-blown HTML viewer from what I've seen in https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-33336

> * It can't be QtWebEngine, because both you and Andre aren't willing to pay the price

I see some other critical voices in this email thread as well.

> From your response, I'm only gathering two options:

There are other options.
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-June/036712.html
summarizes many of them.
Additionally “strip down QtWebEngine or QtWebKit and support that”.
Or, separating "plain and simple API documentation" to be displayed directly an Qt Creator/Assistant from “fancy tutorials” to be displayed by a browser of the user’s choice.

> 1. Live with it and hope that somehow this will solve itself in the future -- there is no evidence from the past years that this is going to happen. Recall that the ticket we are still debating over is from March 2016.

> 2. Give QtWebEngine at least a try, let the users decide in a BETA phase.

- a tiny percentage of users use Betas
- there already is quite some controversy in this email thread

Br, Eike

> Kavindra.
> 
> 
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-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

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