Built-in web browser dialog window
It would be useful not only for showing help pages inside blender, but also would allow addon developers to develop custom UIs that are based on HTML / JavaScript (e.g. pose editor).
The implementation could be lightweight and use similar technology like DeskGap (i.e. do not embed web browser like electron, but rather use system browser): github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap
3 Comments
While I don't doubt this would be convenient for addon devs with a certain background, why not just use the thing that already exists and works fine for this purpose (PyQT)? You can even get fancy and use a QWebView object to render html/css directly in a PyQT window.
If the devs were to consider a proposal like this, even using some pre-existing OSS solution like chromium to render the markup, you'd still need some kind of interaction layer to interface with Blender- given the background of addon developers who would want HTML/CSS in the first place they will probably want javascript so they can bring all of their node/jquery/whatever stuff over as well. Which then means maintaining a brand new javascript API to complement the Python API. You can probably see where this starts to become a slippery slope.
Note that I'm neither for nor against this idea, just giving feedback as to why it's probably a super long shot.
* @testure * License issues and huge binary
* @sheerun * okay, so pyside then :)
I don't personally consider binary size to be a detriment in this case since we're talking about edge case users here and not the 'general use case', and really it's only like 100mb. Sure, that's big for a python module- but this isn't 1998, even in third world countries you can pull that down without much trouble. On a lot of systems it's likely already sitting in site-packages ready to go because it's ubiquitous (especially in a studio setting).