4 ms·

I bet it's possible to achieve layout completeness (in the same vein as turing completeness) with a much simpler markup and styling language. I'm actually more

I bet it's possible to achieve layout completeness (in the same vein as turing completeness) with a much simpler markup and styling language. I'm actually more interested in implementing a toy OS or a toy compiler for a toy language because the browser seems to be a more of very specific complex mess of mistakes and legacy choices rather then a serious theoretical concept. Although I'm sure you'll still learn a lot if you implement one.

emmanueloga_ 8y ago
I don't know about the "completeness" part but the idea of making a brower-like rendering system without the burden of having to support old standards and data formats _is_ appealing. I think this is what projects like QML [1], JavaFX [2], Avalonia [3] and more recently Flutter [4] have done (also... Flash! does anybody remember it anymore? One minute of silence please...). It is too bad none of these projects decouple well enough the layout and rendering part, they are really very coupled to their respective environments and all of them are super idiosyncratic and make cross-language development almost impossible or unpractical (except maybe Qt but it is not quite the same model as QML), as opposed to the openness of the web platform. I think maybe all of them use Skia on the back though? Some of these projects are similar to the browser in that they allow controlling the content using an scripting language (JavaScript for QML). What do you get when you mix a rasterizer plus a scripting system or VM plus a layout system plus some IO primitives? Macromedia Flash! Just kidding, you get a browser. Or either one :-). 1: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlapplications.html http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlapplications.html 2: https://openjfx.io/ https://openjfx.io/ 3: http://avaloniaui.net/ http://avaloniaui.net/ 4: https://flutter.io/docs/resources/technical-overview https://flutter.io/docs/resources/technical-overview With regard to browser specific problems, I came across these articles from this "Meyerovich" guy talking about some opportunities to optimize and parallelize the layout process. Honestly a lot of this stuff flies over my head (formulating the layout problem with attribute grammars? I don't even know how to use attribute grammars for the "normal" things... :-p). I have the idea of maybe coming back to these papers some day with more time and patience and go over the references, etc: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper.... https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/login.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/login.... https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/hotpar09/paper.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/hotpar09/paper....
- Yoric 8y ago
  Another problem would be the delivery. Yes, writing something that behaves like a browser would be nice, but it took 10-15 years for browsers to be present on enough computers to make a clear difference, and there is currently no reason to assume that a new technology that is the-same-but-simpler would have nearly as much success. Of course, the solution would probably be to compile that code to something that works in actual browsers, which would be somewhat ironic :)
  - emmanueloga_ 8y ago
    I would say, if you managed to cross compile your new browser into a statically linked binary executable weighting a few hundred kilobytes, it would become trivial to distribute and a very attractive “platform”.
    - naasking 8y ago
      You could probably easily render it in a regular browser using JS as well. Instant universal deployment.
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    They can bake in dual rendering solutions into the browser and wait for the better solution to takeover. Very similar to what is happening with JS and web assembly.
- mingodad 8y ago
  There is also https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser for RISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux), Mac OS X, and more.
  - swiley 8y ago
    Have you ever tried building it? It’s small compared to Firefox but not “small as a mouse.” Lynx or (maybe) linemode might qualify for that.
pdamoc 8y ago
You might be interested in STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming [1]. Rather than "layout complete" I would be interested in a select set of well thought approaches to layout. Something like flexbox+grid might be the best. Flexbox could be used for simple layouts that flow in one direction while grid could be used for master layouts and complex widgets. 1: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf
- emmanueloga_ 8y ago
  Nice, I read that report some time ago and since I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of model and language driven development. It really seems like a much better way of writing software.

emmanueloga_ 8y ago

I don't know about the "completeness" part but the idea of making a brower-like rendering system without the burden of having to support old standards and data formats _is_ appealing. I think this is what projects like QML [1], JavaFX [2], Avalonia [3] and more recently Flutter [4] have done (also... Flash! does anybody remember it anymore? One minute of silence please...). It is too bad none of these projects decouple well enough the layout and rendering part, they are really very coupled to their respective environments and all of them are super idiosyncratic and make cross-language development almost impossible or unpractical (except maybe Qt but it is not quite the same model as QML), as opposed to the openness of the web platform. I think maybe all of them use Skia on the back though? Some of these projects are similar to the browser in that they allow controlling the content using an scripting language (JavaScript for QML). What do you get when you mix a rasterizer plus a scripting system or VM plus a layout system plus some IO primitives? Macromedia Flash! Just kidding, you get a browser. Or either one :-). 1: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlapplications.html http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlapplications.html 2: https://openjfx.io/ https://openjfx.io/ 3: http://avaloniaui.net/ http://avaloniaui.net/ 4: https://flutter.io/docs/resources/technical-overview https://flutter.io/docs/resources/technical-overview With regard to browser specific problems, I came across these articles from this "Meyerovich" guy talking about some opportunities to optimize and parallelize the layout process. Honestly a lot of this stuff flies over my head (formulating the layout problem with attribute grammars? I don't even know how to use attribute grammars for the "normal" things... :-p). I have the idea of maybe coming back to these papers some day with more time and patience and go over the references, etc: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper.... https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/login.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/login.... https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/hotpar09/paper.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/hotpar09/paper....

Yoric 8y ago
Another problem would be the delivery. Yes, writing something that behaves like a browser would be nice, but it took 10-15 years for browsers to be present on enough computers to make a clear difference, and there is currently no reason to assume that a new technology that is the-same-but-simpler would have nearly as much success. Of course, the solution would probably be to compile that code to something that works in actual browsers, which would be somewhat ironic :)
- emmanueloga_ 8y ago
  I would say, if you managed to cross compile your new browser into a statically linked binary executable weighting a few hundred kilobytes, it would become trivial to distribute and a very attractive “platform”.
  - naasking 8y ago
    You could probably easily render it in a regular browser using JS as well. Instant universal deployment.
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  They can bake in dual rendering solutions into the browser and wait for the better solution to takeover. Very similar to what is happening with JS and web assembly.
mingodad 8y ago
There is also https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser for RISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux), Mac OS X, and more.
- swiley 8y ago
  Have you ever tried building it? It’s small compared to Firefox but not “small as a mouse.” Lynx or (maybe) linemode might qualify for that.

pdamoc 8y ago

You might be interested in STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming [1]. Rather than "layout complete" I would be interested in a select set of well thought approaches to layout. Something like flexbox+grid might be the best. Flexbox could be used for simple layouts that flow in one direction while grid could be used for master layouts and complex widgets. 1: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

emmanueloga_ 8y ago
Nice, I read that report some time ago and since I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of model and language driven development. It really seems like a much better way of writing software.