KHTML is a discontinued

Built on the KParts framework and written in C++, KHTML had relatively good support for Web standards during its prime. Engines that are forked from KHTML are used by most of the browsers that are widely used today, including WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Google Chrome, Chromium, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave).

History

Origins

KHTML was preceded by an earlier engine called khtmlw or the KDE HTML Widget, developed by Torben Weis and Martin Jones, which implemented support for HTML 3.2, HTTP 1.0, and HTML frames, but not the DOM, CSS, or JavaScript.

KHTML itself came into existence on November 4, 1998, was among those who did the work of creating that early version of KHTML. began doing research with an eye toward implementing the DOM specification, finally announcing on August 16, 1999 that he had checked in what amounted to a complete rewrite of the KHTML library—changing KHTML to use the standard DOM as its internal document representation. That in turn allowed the beginnings of JavaScript support to be added in October 1999, to add CSS support and to refine and stabilize the KHTML architecture, (as the rendering engine of the new Konqueror file and web browser, which replaced the monolithic KDE File Manager).

Other modules

KSVG was first developed in 2001 by Nikolas Zimmermann and Rob Buis. However, by 2003, it was decided to fork the then-current KSVG implementation into two new projects: KDOM/KSVG2 (to improve the state of DOM rendering in KHTML underneath a more formidable SVG 1.0 render state) and Kcanvas (to abstract any rendering done within KHTML/KSVG2 in a single shared library, with multiple backends for it, e.g., Cairo/Qt, etc.).

KSVG2 is also a part of WebKit.

Sunsetting

KHTML was scheduled to be removed in KDE Frameworks 6. Active development ended in 2016, just the necessary maintenance to work with updates to Frameworks 5.)

  • CSS 3 Other (multiple backgrounds, box-sizing and text-shadow)
  • PNG, MNG, JPEG, GIF graphic formats
  • DOM 1, 2 and partially 3
  • ECMA-262/JavaScript 1.5
  • Partial Scalable Vector Graphics support

Descendants

KHTML and KJS were adopted by Apple in 2002 for use in the Safari web browser. Apple publishes the source code for their fork of the KHTML engine, called WebKit. In 2013, Google began development on a fork of WebKit, called Blink, which is now widely used in the most popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave and more.

See also

  • Comparison of browser engines

References

  • Web Browser – the Konqueror website
  • KHTML – KDE's HTML library – description at developer.kde.org
  • KHTML at the KDE git repository
  • From KDE to WebKit: The Open Source Engine That's Here to Stay – presentation at Yahoo! office by Lars Knoll and George Staikos on December 8, 2006 (video)