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Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)

(github.com)
233 points monax | 1 comments | 18 May 25 17:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source

We’ve been working on Vaev, a minimal web browser engine built from scratch. It supports HTML/XHTML, the CSS cascade, @page rules for pagination, and print-to-PDF rendering. It even handles calc(), var(), and percentage units—and yes, it renders Google.com (mostly).

This is an experimental project focused on learning and exploration. Networking is basic (http:// and file:// only), and grid layouts aren’t supported yet, but we’re making progress fast.

We’d love your thoughts and feedback.

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khimaros ◴[18 May 25 20:30 UTC] No.44024102[source]▶
i find myself requesting this whenever i see a new minimalist browser pop up:

it would be great to standardize alternative browsers on a consistent subset of web standards and document them so that "smolweb" enthusiasts can target that when building their websites and alternative browsers makers can target something useful without boiling the ocean

i personally prefer this approach to brand new protocols like Gemini, because it retains backward compatibility with popular browsers while offering an off ramp.

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userbinator ◴[18 May 25 21:30 UTC] No.44024442[source]▶
The subset could just be an older version of the spec, e.g. HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1.

(My opinion as another one who has been slowly working on my own browser engine.)

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ghayes ◴[18 May 25 22:00 UTC] No.44024611[source]▶
I feel like some of the newer standards like CSS Grid instead of tables might be the best way to go. Many HTML/CSS improvements were not just bloat but actually better standards to build on.
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userbinator ◴[18 May 25 23:09 UTC] No.44024982[source]▶
You still need to have tables.
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1. WorldMaker ◴[19 May 25 16:09 UTC] No.44031340[source]▶
But the rendering engine might be easier to build with TABLE as a specialization of CSS Grid layout rendering rather than the slow real world work of CSS Grid being a generalization of TABLE rendering.