PureBasic Forum

I will give it a try if enough people are interested in funding it (please make an offer in PM so I can keep track of it)

@Fred

Would you do this as a module or integrate it into the core PB?

I'm asking because some people want to stay (or need to stay) on LTS releases and it could
take a rather long time until they could use sciter (natively through PB) if they would need
to wait for the next LTS release...

Probably a lib as I will need to toy with C++

At the risk of making Fred a little testy... Why not just make WebKitGTK+ available for the Windows platform too? Surely the work for WebKitGTK+ must already be done for the Linux version of WebGadet?

This tutorial shows how to extend WebKitGTK+ JavaScriptCore with custom functions.

It looks to me that Sciter doesn't support some modern CSS features like CSS Grid and I imagine it will always be behind the curve vs WebKit in that regard.

I am the author of initial proposal of what is known now as flexbox and grid at W3C : https://sciter.com/docs/flex-flow/flex-layout.htm

Flexibility in sciter is still a superset of what browsers can offer now.

If you have markup like this:



then you can define grid layout in CSS by this:



Here is how it looks:



As you see that's a lot easier than what you have in browsers.

Yet, don't forget that desktop UI is bit more than just HTML/CSS.

At some point you will discover that you will need something like this:

elem.popup(popupElem, at)

to show arbitrary DOM elements as popup elements (DOM-element-in-its-own-window) like here


Yet HTML desktop windows: https://sciter.com/html-window/ with support of Acrylic/Vibrancy: https://sciter.com/sciter-4-2-support-o ... c-theming/

Hi c-smile,

Purely from a UI point of view Sciter would be a big enhancement for PB but we also have the issue of PB's outdated WebGadget on Windows. CSS Grid landed in most mainstream browsers in the first half of 2017. It's all very well having an alternative way of laying out our own UI but what if we want to display received HTML that uses CSS Grid for its layout? That's really my point, WebKit is always likely to be the better bet in that scenario because it's in Chrome, Opera, Safari...

after thinking about it again, I believe it would be better if PureBasic got an improved WebGadget based on the newest version of WebKit or CEF on all platforms (so that the terrible Internet Explorer can finally retire).
There should also be commands that allow JavaScript functions to be called from PB and vice versa PB procedures to be called from JavaScript.

Just my two cents ... Peter

Even if an extended webgadget certainly makes sense, the current webgadget should perhaps be retained. With it you can make small hints in an app, for which no Html5 is needed and the code does not inflate unnecessarily.

good point! +1

If we get a high quality webview for PureBasic then Fred and Freak only have one set of Gadgets to keep improving and updating... those in SpiderBasic. At the moment it seems SpiderBasic's gadgets have to be artificially limited in order to maintain compatibility with PureBasic.

Peter's excellent enhancements have already made a number of SpiderBasic's gadgets considerably better than their PureBasic counterpart.

+1

I would also help funding this

Hi to all. I`ve just come across this https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia maybe something else we should keep an eye on MIT Licence too.

Zebuddi.

Nuklear is very similar. What I found attractive is that it's a single-header ANSI C gui library. (less than 18k)

https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear

Hi, all these are great and nice GUI libraries, but I think the real benefit of a Sciter solution is the ability to scale to whatever DPI you need (Nuklear and Avalonia do not even mention supporting other DPI), HTML and CSS is something you find unlimited tips and tricks in the Internet, many people are already familiar with HTML and CSS, it supports JavaScript and many other well known technologies.

Also, it renders using a Chrome engine. This means using the Graphics card capabilities and using proven render technology. I really prefer such Sciter solution.

Sciter doesn't support JavaScript. It has its own scripting language called TIScript.

see also: https://sciter.com/forums/topic/using-js-libraries/

For this reason you cannot use many UI libraries like UIKit, Semantic UI, MaterializeCSS, Framework7, etc..

Therefore I plead for an improved WebGadget (see my posting above).

Greetings ... Peter