GtkHTML is a layout engine

Layout engine

A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...

 written in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 using the GTK+

GTK+

GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

 widget toolkit

Widget toolkit

In computing, a widget toolkit, widget library, or GUI toolkit is a set of widgets for use in designing applications with graphical user interfaces...

. It is primarily used by Novell Evolution

Novell Evolution

Evolution or Novell Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004...

 and other GTK+ applications. The Balsa

Balsa (e-mail client)

Balsa is a lightweight email client for GNOME.Balsa has a graphical front end, support for MIME attachments coming and going, directly supports POP3 and IMAP protocols. It has a spell checker and direct support for PGP and GPG for encryption. It has some basic filtering capabilities, and natively...

 email client used GtkHTML as its layout engine for displaying emails until recently. In the long run, GtkHTML is planned to be phased out in favor of WebKit

WebKit

WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...

 in GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

.

History

It was forked from KHTML

KHTML

KHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project. It is the engine used by the Konqueror web browser. A forked version of KHTML called WebKit is used by several web browsers, among them Safari and Google Chrome...

 by Larry Ewing

Larry Ewing

Larry Ewing is a U.S. computer programmer who is known as the creator of the Linux mascot, Tux. He also created the Ximian monkey logo and is involved in:*F-Spot: a project aiming to "manage all your digital photography needs."...

 with help from the late Ettore Perazzoli

Ettore Perazzoli

Ettore Perazzoli was an Italian free software developer.-Biography:Born in Milan, Italy, he studied Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano university. He wrote a port of x64, a Commodore 64 emulator for Unix, to DOS, thus turning it into a cross-platform emulator, which was renamed to VICE...

, and was published by Ximian

Ximian

Ximian was a company that provided free software desktop applications for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. Ximian was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in October, 1999, and was bought by Novell on August 4, 2003...

 before the company was bought by Novell

Novell

Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

. However, the GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

 project has devoted much more resources to the use of other open source layout engines, such as Gecko

Gecko (layout engine)

Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....

 and WebKit

WebKit

WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...

, in GNOME applications such as Epiphany.

External links

• GtkHTML RoadMap
• FSF Directory for GtkHTML
• Programming with GtkHTML
• Python GtkHTML extension
• Creating an HTML editor using GtkHTML (Parts 1 and 2)