Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust

Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust by dukoid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @08:33AM (#24177242)

I wonder if it would be possible to distill the "rendering essence" of HTML+CSS, i.e. have a pre-processor that transforms a lot of redundancies / complexities out to just a hierarchy of spans+divs with style attributes.

For a modern browser, the two hierarchies would need to be dynamically linked, but specifying the "view hierarchy" in terms of a (very limited) HTML/CSS subset should yield the advantage that the correctness of the transformation step could still be inspected with a browser?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust by goto11 on Sunday August 16, 2020 @11:08AM (#24178407)

This was the idea behind XSL (and DSSSL before that). You transform semantic markup into a pure presentation format. By moving the transformation to the server you can have all the complexity of selectors, rules, inheritance, cascade etc resolved on the server and have the browser just receive low-level rendering instructions.

Of course you can't have any form of dynamic HTML and accessibility would go out the windows.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust by dukoid on Monday August 24, 2020 @02:30PM (#24263778)

I think there the presentation format typically would be a different language (such as xsl-fo)... I am suggesting a transformation to a subset of HTML+CSS

[ Parent | on HN ]