Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust
by jefftk on Saturday August 15, 2020 @07:49PM
(#24173480)
> Twitter, Reddit, and most other popular websites already look terrible.
There's terrible, and then there's terrible. If you try to implement things in a much simpler way, you will get many completely unreadable websites. Images will cover text, some text will be off the screen, it will be a garbled mess.
#1 80/20 is more than sufficient. If your browser legibly renders Facebook, Bootstrap, and maybe a dozen others, call it good.
#2 Fidelity is overrated. With adblockers and reader view, who cares about pixel perfect? Twitter, Reddit, and most other popular websites already look terrible. A better web browser doesn't help.
#3 Sites that care about that extra polish should use bespoke layout managers.
For a while, I had a thing about design grids and ensuring text baselines were properly aligned. Spent way too much time wrestling with layout managers.
Finally gave up and rolled my own. Less code, easy to debug, got exactly what I wanted.
Always had a notion to "port" my design grid based layout manager to the web, but I just don't care any more. I consume most of my news via RSS. Assume my target audience would do the same. So any future content I publish will be as stupid simple as possible.