About the HTML support: This only simply draws to a HTML canvas. This is mostly just a nice and simple hack but I doubt that people would use GTK now as an alternative to real web frameworks. I have seen similar hacks for VNC, X11 and other stuff.
This would be much more interesting if the GTK components map to real HTML elements.
>This would be much more interesting if the GTK components map to real HTML elements.
This is where we're eventually headed, the mozilla project "chromeless" is an interesting experiment down the path. IIRC It gets rid of XUL for the application chrome and uses html/js for the entire program gui.
"This would be much more interesting if the GTK components map to real HTML elements."
This is really hard to do wrt skinning. The only thing you really want is text selection to work properly for cut-and-paste. A good question to ask is what does the Canvas backend for GTK for cut-and-paste now?
Something that crossed my mind, maybe you can help me answer. Are there cases where it would be easier to create a GTK application than a javascript application? This whole concept seems like it opens up a lot of opportunities for websites to provide rich interfaces, but then I think, wait, aren't people thinking of going the opposite direction? For instance, the high level GUI programming for Gnome Shell is in javascript.
It would be entirely possible to do both at the same time. There are javascript bindings for GTK. This isn't so much a workaround for javascript as a workaround for HTML.
And yes, there are absolutely cases where it would be easier to create a GTK application than an HTML application. You don't need to worry about choosing a widget library, for one, and placement is very straightforward.
From looking at it, it seems that it doesn't - that it is running the app in the server and updating the screen in HTML5 canvas. It would be cool if it compiles the code to Javascript though... so that you get complete client side platform independent apps out of the current entire Gnome repository!
GTK itself will probably never do that, because it doesn't include any sort of language-processing code (as I understand it). Adding code to GTK that could translate programs between languages would be a huge increase in complexity and scope.
However, a project like GCC could certainly do that. If someone really wanted that to happen, they could add a Javascript code generator to GCC and pair that with GTK's HTML5 backend to produce something like what you want.
The implications of this are incredible with tablet computers becoming more and more popular. QT is approaching this as well with their Lighthouse project but I think it is still a little ways off.
I really want to start playing with this, is there any reason why it wouldn't work with the python GTK bindings?
This would be much more interesting if the GTK components map to real HTML elements.