From: Alan Gutierrez <alan-ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-10-02T14:17:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Interest in Boost::Ruby

* Randy Kramer <rhkramer@gmail.com> [2005-10-01 14:49]:
> On Friday 30 September 2005 11:06 pm, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> > On 9/30/05, Alan Gutierrez <alan-ruby-talk@engrm.com> wrote:
> > > * Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> [2005-09-30 21:41]:
> > > > On 9/30/05, Alan Gutierrez <alan-ruby-talk@engrm.com> wrote:

> > >>> I'd like to build a CSS renderer in modern C++ as an enthusist's
> > >>> pursuit. I don't want to get bogged down in huge build systems, or
> > >>> many different IDEs.

> Just to be sure I'm on the same page, by CSS renderer, you mean
> something that renders HTML, using style information from a CSS
> file/sheet?

    Yes.

    I say CSS renderer, because I'm interested in applying Cascading
    Style Sheets to an Infoset [1], which could be constructed by
    ways other than parsing HTML or XML.

> If yes, I'm interested and may try to help (to the extent I can).
> (I want something that renders very quickly, and provides an easy
> interface from another thingie (like a specialized editor widget)
> (I don't want to send the data from the other thingie to a file to
> be opened by the CSS renderer, but something much more direct--I'd
> rather send a pointer to a string containing the HTML or something
> along those lines.)
> 
> Do you plan to render the CSS/HTML in a GUI widget type thingie,
> or somehow just have console output (along the lines of lynx,
> links, ...)?  (I'm looking for a GUI widget.)

    GUI.

> If you plan on a GUI widget, do you have a prebuilt one in mind?
> Which?
    
    The CSS renderer is going to work with GUI primitives.

    I'm going to develop the objects, Font, Pen, Brush, Surface, for
    each OS X, Gtk, and Win32 GDI. These will be written in intially
    in baby-talk C++ and made avialable as Ruby classes. 
    
    Then I'll use Ruby for the rendering. 

> If I'm way off base, maybe you can clarify a little more what you
> have in mind.  (I see Austin's (?) reference to applying CSS to
> SVG documents in the next paragraph--is that what you have in
> mind?)

    Okay. I'm going to start a Wiki page.

    http://engrm.com/wiki/Refresh

    And a mailing list. 

    refresh-subscribe@engrm.com

    I have a Subversion repository, and I'll check stuff into it.

    http://engrm.com/svn/open/trunk/refresh/

> > >> Just for what it's worth, after RubyConf, I hope to be working on a
> > >> CSS engine. The purpose of this engine will be very limited --
> > >> applying CSS to SVG documents for proper rendering in PDF documents,
> > >> but it will be written entirely in Ruby.

> > Heh, um. CSS is most certainly *not* a clean specification. It's
> > implementable, sure, but there are certainly things that I will be
> > ignoring in the spec -- it's a right mess, that spec.

> > > My plan would be to create UI primitives in C++ first, and
> > > make then available to Ruby. This rather than adopting Qt or
> > > Tk similiar, since it would have a lot of things I don't need.

> Hmm, I've tried C++ a few times, never made much progress, I think
> I'd prefer something more Ruby like, although I'm only in the
> (temporarily interrupted) process of learning Ruby.

    Ruby will be a first class citizen in the project. It will be a
    programmers choice as to how to use the resources.

    I want to learn Ruby, and make the most of it. I don't see one
    as language as better than the other. I'm interested in working
    with both of them as a language pair.

--
Alan Gutierrez - alan@engrm.com - http://engrm.com/blogometer/