Webkit GTK: Determine when a document is finished loading

Question

There are other questions on StackOverflow which are close to what I want to know, like Webkit GTK :: How to detect when a download has finished?, but I think I'm asking something a bit different:

In general, in the event-driven C Webkit-GTK API there are a lot of events which may relate to the idea of when some document is finished "loading". The problem is the documentation is pretty sparse, and the idea of "finished loading" isn't necessarily clear, because it can refer to a lot of things. Does "finished loading" mean that the document is finished downloading? That it's finished creating the DOM tree? That it's finished downloading including all other resources (like CSS, JS and image files?)

Relevant signals are signal::notify::load-status, document-load-finished, and resource-load-finished.

The load-status signal fires everytime the load status changes, so you need to manually call webkit_web_view_get_load_status and check the status each time. Even so, when the status finally is WEBKIT_LOAD_FINISHED, I'm not sure what that means - does it mean WebKit is done downloading the resource, or that it's finished creating the DOM tree, or what?

Question:

What is the difference between the various "finished" signals, and is there any signal that is equivalent to the standard Javascript DOM event window.onload?

Answer 1

I believe the document-load-finished signal is what you are looking for as it seems (in my opinion) to match more closely what you are trying to test for.

One idea to test which is the correct way to do this would be to test the various ways there are to test if a document has "loaded" manually. I.e. Try the one I linked to above, and output a string to the Terminal when the value is true. If the value is true before the page has completely displayed all of its contents, chances are that it's not the one you're after. Then move on to the next, until you've got the right one.

Other than that, I'm not really sure what else you can do, since as you mentioned, the definition isn't very clear. It's times like these I wish Gtk documentation was a little more verbose.