67 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
67 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
Hi,
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I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser
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built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
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making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my
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development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
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excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to
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open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back
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to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue
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among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
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I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact
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information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back
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in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David
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Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but
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also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the
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Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken
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Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.
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The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web
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browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
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ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
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excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
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less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
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development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
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open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the
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small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
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performance as you can see reflected in the data at
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http://www.apple.com/safari/ .
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How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent.
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The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my
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team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other
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components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ
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(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML
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and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've
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also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance
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improvements to KHTML and KJS.
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Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half
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the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They
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should be available at
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http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/ very soon. Also,
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we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and
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additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email
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will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also
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like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list.
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Please advise us on which one to use.
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We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and
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we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this
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purpose.
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Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.
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Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.
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--
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Don Melton
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Safari Engineering Manager
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Apple Computer
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P.S. -- I'm sending you this email while attending MacWorld exposition
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so it may take myself and my staff several hours before we can respond
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to email. My apologies in advance.
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