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Web Browser Engineering (2021)

(browser.engineering)
679 points MrVandemar | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 09:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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mannyv ◴[15 Oct 24 13:50 UTC] No.41848587[source]▶
One great thing about this book is the 'stuff I didn't do' part.

Layout is really hard. Just tables by themselves are hard, even without any css around them. CSS makes layout impossibly difficult. I challenge anyone to keep the whole CSS spec and its associated behaviors in their head.

At this point css + html + javascript have become a dynamic PDL, and probably is one of the most complex pieces of software today.

As an aside, video decoding is offloaded onto hardware, so it's not as battery intensive as it used to be.

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1. hinkley ◴[15 Oct 24 19:48 UTC] No.41852399[source]▶
I did layout for a feature phone browser. WAP and mercifully XHTML-basic’s ideas of layout was simple enough that I could treat spans as a concave octagon - a rectangle with a bite out of the upper left and lower right corner. It made it at least an order of magnitude faster to paint and scroll a long document, and much simpler to think about.

In the years since I’ve used a lot of tricks for web app CSS that I’m not sure I’m smart enough to figure out. But then I’ve never thought as long and as hard about typesetting as I did at the time so who knows.