GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 658684
Looking Glass needs a model viewer and a css viewer. Now THAT would be cool.
Last modified: 2011-12-01 19:27:18 UTC
Having the ability to play with the stuff on the screen (the box models, the CSS, etc) would open up a new world of possibilities. What language are the box models represented in? Is it HTML? XML? SOmething else but similar? Can someone please, please, please add a CSS editor to be able to play around with live changes. How does clutter run? Is it similar to the web kits like webkit, gecko, presto, or trident in any way? I'd imagine you could use a browser engine like webkit and use plugins to inject things like GTK into the box models. Now THAT would be sick because I'm a web developer and am so familiar with the firebug and webkit inspectors. But, I'd imagine Clutter wouldn't be too different when it comes to having an element/css inspector. I feel blocked without such a feature. ;)
(In reply to comment #0) > Having the ability to play with the stuff on the screen (the box models, the > CSS, etc) would open up a new world of possibilities. > > What language are the box models represented in? Is it HTML? XML? SOmething > else but similar? If by this you mean the element hierarchies, it's a Clutter thing. Clutter is a scene graph library and handles element relationships. Where elements are positioned on screen is the job of the container or the layout manager. > Can someone please, please, please add a CSS editor to be able to play around > with live changes. Patches welcome, but this is a big feat in itself, and probably won't be developed by someone on the core team. > How does clutter run? Is it similar to the web kits like webkit, gecko, presto, > or trident in any way? No. The "scene graph" concept is more similar to Flash's "display list" concept that a browser's DOM. > I'd imagine you could use a browser engine like webkit and use plugins to > inject things like GTK into the box models. Now THAT would be sick because I'm > a web developer and am so familiar with the firebug and webkit inspectors. I'm unsure what this means. > But, I'd imagine Clutter wouldn't be too different when it comes to having an > element/css inspector. Clutter does not have native support for CSS. The Shell's widget toolkit, St, built on Clutter, adds CSS capability. There's some loose plans to merge this with the other major Clutter toolkit, Mx, but nothing concrete.
(In reply to comment #0) > Having the ability to play with the stuff on the screen (the box models, the > CSS, etc) would open up a new world of possibilities. > > What language are the box models represented in? Is it HTML? XML? Something > else but similar? None of above, and not at all similar. In fact, there is no box model in Clutter (or GTK+ for that matter), its model ("scene graph") works very different from HTML. The reason (a subset of) CSS was picked to implement the theme is just that it is easier to work with a familiar format than to learn yet-another-custom-format. It does not mean that the desktop is technically similar to a web page. (Neither does the choice of Javascript - for a starter, there is no DOM) > Can someone please, please, please add a CSS editor to be able to play around > with live changes. Indeed, we had a Google Summer of Code student working on that last year. Unfortunately the feature was not merged - there are patches in bug 626102, but someone will have to pick up her work and clean it up to get it in. > How does clutter run? Is it similar to the web kits like webkit, gecko, presto, > or trident in any way? No, see above. Webkit, gecko et al are browser engines to render web pages. Clutter is a library to manipulate a scene graph (of 2D surfaces) on top of OpenGL. > But, I'd imagine Clutter wouldn't be too different when it comes to having an > element/css inspector. Looking glass does have an element inspector - try clicking the small picker icon in the top left!
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 626102 ***
Thanks for the comments you guys. I now see Clutter in a new perspective. On a side note, this makes me think: it could be powerful to implement a DOM-like platform using Clutter so that normal web-based CSS and Javascript can be used to style and manipulate the DOM... a 100% OpenGL-powered browser; the first of its kind... I was thinking of this because all the browsers today still render the DOM with software graphics. Yes there's WebGL, but that is seperate from the DOM, unfortunately. Why has no one made an OpenGL rendered DOM yet? I don't know. But perhaps it can be done in Clutter.