Ajax Girl

With so much talk of new browsers to support, it is great when consolidation happens. The good news of the day is the unforking of KDE’s KHTML and Webkit.

This is great news for Webkit. Now the communities of Adobe, Apple, Nokia, and the good folk of KDE will continue to grow Webkit.

Now, KHTML won’t be deleted right away since there are features in it that need to be ported into Webkit. For example, KHTML (in KDE 4) implements portions of the definition of the CSS3 standard, which will need to be adopted into Webkit and so forth. But the big deal is that the coders that invented the underlying layers that power Konqueror, some Nokia browsers, Abrowse, Safari, Adobe’s Air, and now Epiphany and a few other projects that are in the works, are now back in the fold. Additionally, Trolltech has announced that they are including Webkit in their upcoming Qt 4.4 release which means that a major, cross-platform toolkit now permits anyone to use the Webkit rendering engine where ever they need to render some HTML.

In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/137117058/webkit-and-khtml-sitting-in-a-tree