Thanks to a conversation this morning with the wxWebKit maintainer (who doesn't have a homepage, the cad) and the current Strawberry Perl maintainer I now have a much better idea of what needs to be done in the immediate. I think.
On Linux (and I assume Mac) the wxGC option in wxWigets necessary for wxWebKit is enabled by default, meaning a Wx::WebKit module should work out of the box with any default (unicode) wxWidgets pack installed on those platforms. The only issue there is a rendering bugfix in GTK+ which has yet to be rolled out, but should be available in the next few days.
On Windows, wxWebKit can work without wxGC set. I've been examining the Alien::wxWidgets installer and I'm not sure yet if it has the ability to make the necessary amendments to the file /build/msw/setup.h before building from source - I think it should do, and if so adding the ability to specify --enable-graphics_ctx shouldn't be any bother.
The bigger issue on Windows is making wxWebKit, which currently requires MSVC, compilable with MinGW, so that Strawberry users can use it with no fuss. I was completely wrong last week when I said A::wx requires a gcc 'widgets build, as mattia pointed out. It just wasn't finding my MSVC-build libs because it takes its cue for compilers from the running perl's Config.pm.
Work on mingw support on the wx port at least is apparently scanty, and I doubt I have the C++ know-how to do it myself. Hopefully someone will have done some work towards that end on one of the other toolkit ports of WebKit (Qt, Cairo etc). I'd certainly be interested in working on it long term, but as far as the Summer of Code goes I'd say I might have to put up some binaries for people to use in the meantime.
I think the best thing to proceed with now is Wx::WebKit on Linux to show it working, and we can worry about how exactly to make it easy to use on Windows later.
After some frustrating weeks I think everything's starting to come together :-)
