FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Hipe is an effort to turn Webkit from a web browser engine into a fully-fledged HTML-powered display server.

What is a display server?

Unless you're reading this on a sheet of paper, you're probably using a graphical display server right now.

All mainstream operating systems provide a graphical display server. This provides apps and users with services such as GUI rendering, windowing (nesting applications within rectangular frames), and mouse interaction.

For example, Windows has traditionally used the GDI system (some cheap printers that only work with Windows still require their pages to be formatted in terms of Windows GDI instructions), Apple's OS-X uses the Quartz system with PDF as its internal display language, and Unix-style operating systems use the insanely complicated and outdated (but very stable) X Window System.

Why a new one?

The problem with display servers is that nobody really cares about display servers anymore. Rendering user interfaces and managing screen layout are complex problems. Compared to the cumulative billions of dollars that the software industry has put into perfecting graphical engines for web browsers, native OS-level display capabilities have fallen well behind.

You might ask, 'why not just use web browsers for everything?', and at first glance, that's the way things
are heading. But web browsers require web pages, and are constrained by the nature of the hypertext transfer protocol that facilitates page request. Native applications don't work that way. Native app experiences aren't delivered as web pages. They are delivered by manipulating on-screen elements directly.

Is this a standalone display server? Do I still need X?

For the time being the Hipe server process is something that runs on top of X (Hipe uses X to make its top-level windows). That means you can run Hipe programs alongside X programs in an existing desktop environment.

Eventually it will make sense to cut out the middleman (e.g. for embedded devices) and use something like DirectFB instead of X, so that Hipe looks and acts like a standalone display server. In this mode of operation, there will only be one top-level window that contains everything else (like the 'root window' in X).

Will Hipe run all my existing desktop applications without modification?

No. Hipe is something completely new, and applications (or GUI toolkits) have to be written sepecifically for it.

How does the user experience differ?

There is a window hierarchy (like X and many other windowing systems), but Hipe uses webkit to render and lay out content within each window, so the user interfaces look more 'webby' and are automatically scrollable if they don't fit their containers. Users can select any text within a window like they can on a web page. However, the system does not involve web pages, so traditional browser concepts like hyperlinks, URLs and back buttons are absent.

Is this a fork of WebKit?

Certainly not. Hipe uses WebKit and wraps WebKit's functionality. WebKit is great as-is and I think it's more sensible to use it as-is than to fork off our own version and short-circuit the efforts of the WebKit development community.

How is it licensed?

Webkit is already GPL so the Hipe display server will be too. That means that you need to comply with the terms of the GNU General Public License in order to modify or redistribute the server component, although it is free to do so. There will also be an additional attribution clause for large corporations, who should acknowledge their use of Hipe in product documentation.

However, the Hipe API which you use if you're writing an application that uses Hipe, is distributed freely with minimal restriction. That means you can write your own graphical applications for Hipe without worrying about license conditions.

Examples:

• If you're an application developer: you can write and distribute your own Hipe applications however you want, freely, without any restrictions.
• If you're an OS distributor: you can distribute the Hipe server system freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
• If you're a large OEM corporation: You can include the Hipe server software freely in your product subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License, with a short attribution included in your product documentation. You can also freely develop your own proprietory (closed-source or otherwise) software that uses the services Hipe provides.