https://sr.ht/~ireas/cursive-markup-rs/
the whole cursive library strikes me as very html-like in layout
It's glorious
You can already do this, since the 90s: Lynx[1] and w3m[2] have both existed for more than three decades at this point.
I mentioned those by name...
>> I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough...I sincerely hope it isn't the reason though, I'm a huge rust fan myself (10years of coding with it already) and I think rust is definitely the future, but that doesn't mean all previous open source foundations should be thrown away.
This is enormously better for UI response time and things like compressed files: you only transfer the compressed text, image, audio, or video files rather than the decoded form which can be an order of magnitude larger.
Edit: A comment here linked to https://www.brow.sh/ It looks amazing.
> but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks
> huge amount of overhead
Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities
> actual hardware acceleration?
Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.
I'm also not sure why you think it's an extra layer between the gpu. Both the browser and terminal emulator are sitting in top of the OS. But also remember if you run headless then your OS doesn't need to load the desktop environment, though you can still use the CLI. At this point clearly the GPU is seeing less, right?
My logic with it being an additional layer is that instead of the browser rendering text to the screen, it would have to speak with the terminal for the terminal to instead render text to the screen. Same goes for rendering graphics. Besides a headless system I don't see much of a benefit to it.
> A website can be as intensive as Word.
If you're willing to live in elisp, Emacs is amazing. I'm not, I'm always going to want to do it with ruby, and well, Emacs doesn't let you do that.
Is anyone working on this?
With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode.
I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)
I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.