Bug 116716

Summary: use KHTML part for the IRC view
Product: [Applications] konversation Reporter: Torrie Fischer <tdfischer>
Component: ircviewAssignee: argonel <argonel>
Status: RESOLVED INTENTIONAL    
Severity: wishlist    
Priority: NOR    
Version: 0.18   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Fedora RPMs   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Torrie Fischer 2005-11-19 19:40:26 UTC
Version:           0.18 (using KDE KDE 3.4.91)
Installed from:    Fedora RPMs
OS:                Linux

In my humble opinion, chatzilla is both the best and the worst IRC client in the known universe. Its worst because it isn't KDE integrated like konversation is (or at least aims to be ;) ), and its the best because it uses HTML for its display. So changing the layout and colors and such is as simple as changing a HTML template, and a CSS file. It also has the ability to download the HTML and CSS files from an external website, so it allows for easy sharing of designs. As you can see in the screenshot [1], each line someone says becomes a row. If each subsequent line recieved comes from them, then another row is added to the row with their nickname in it. To get it to look like that, with the rounded edges (a mozilla-only thing), and with the avatars in the background, I use this [2] css file. It just uses their avatar (from a forum I frequent) as the background for the cell that contains their name.

Now, it kinda seems a bit unrealistic and awkward to use HTML and CSS to style this, with that wish floating around for avatars pulled from kaddressbook. So, why not do the same thing as what kopete does, with the themes and all?

[1] http://images.wm161.net/screenies/cz2.png
[2] http://wm161.net/shite/cz.css

Note: My main motivation behind this whole 'avatars in the irc view' thing, is that after using avatars in chatzilla, I find it many many many more times inefficient at determining who is who by simply their name alone, and the avatars give the people a 'face' instead of just a name.
Comment 1 John Tapsell 2006-01-17 14:07:03 UTC
We will consider something like this for kde4.
Comment 2 Eike Hein 2008-05-01 13:22:52 UTC
We did have a KHTML-using branch for a while in 2006 to test the waters, and were unhappy with the performance and memory usage. While KHTML may have improved in the meantime and Qt 4 now also offers WebKit as an option (which is in use by Mac OS X IRC clients such as Colloquy), we're at a consensus that we while we do want improved stylesheet-like theming, this will focuss around text formatting rather than allow full-blown HTML, to keep focus and performance. Also, some of the plans and ideas we have for the chat view, such as making it a view onto a model that applies a filter to a larger set of data, is rather at odds with the performance characteristics of HTML DOM manipulation vs. direct, optimized rendering. 

Hence, closing WONTFIX.