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Web Browser Engineering (2021)

(browser.engineering)
770 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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vbezhenar ◴[15 Oct 24 14:08 UTC] No.41848784[source]▶
This Babylonian tower will crumble one day.

Layout does not have to be so complex. There are dozens of GUI frameworks with simpler layout system. Those are enough for applications everyone uses.

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maxwell ◴[15 Oct 24 16:16 UTC] No.41850107[source]▶
Which do you recommend?
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1. vbezhenar ◴[17 Oct 24 12:24 UTC] No.41868990[source]▶
I've used Java Swing, Cocoa, Qt, Android. They are pretty good and were enough to build any kind of complex UI that I needed. I'm not sure what's the best one in the world, but generally I've found most GUI layout managers pretty good.

Even basic tools like those which were found in old Delphi, with anchoring components to the parent side, were sufficient for many UI-s, although some tasks like internalisation could case some pain.

In the end my opinion is that there should be a balance between usability and ease of implementation. Especially for technologies which are supposed to have many implementations.