Cassius
sciter
Our great sponsors
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Cassius
-
The Rules of Margin Collapse
FWIW, while there are unfortunately only very few attempts at formalizing CSS, there's at least an unofficial, unreviewed (?), partial formal semantics for (CSS 2-era) float layout based on z3 SMT and Racket you can take a look at to get a flavor, though it isn't receiving further development.
[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius
[2]: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/css-floats.html
-
W3C’s transfer from MIT to non-profit going poorly
Do we need W3C anymore? The HTML 5 specification has been created by WHATWG for many years now, with W3C only rubber-stamping historic WHATWG versions until 2017 or so. SVG2 is going nowhere, and so isn't MathML, leaving the CSS working group as W3C's remaining point of influence over the Web. CSS is regarded as so poor and overdone a specification that the only two external projects for a formal specification have failed or remained woefully incomplete (1, 2).
-
Is There Too Much CSS Now?
1. CSS should've been split into app-y styles and doc-y styles a looong time ago; meaning that when you need JavaScript to make use of a feature anyway, there's no point in using CSS and it's better to set styles, layout using JavaScript rather than bloat CSS. The Houdini API was on the right track years ago.
2. The CSS WG at W3C must deliver formal specification rather than the prose they're writing up now. For an idea how a (partial) formal spec for CSS rendering looks like, see eg. [1], [2] (with limitations).
The one way complexity that both W3C and WHATWG have delivered over the past 15 years with complete lack of mental discipline due to financial dependency/job security will be a major source of confusion for generations to cone, and will not be looked at favorably.
[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius
[2]: https://github.com/lmeyerov/sc
-
Verifying GCC optimizations using an SMT solver
There's this cool project using z3 (and racket) for formalizing CSS rendering [1] I never came around to lift for anything. Maybe someone else interested in leading the web out of the dark ages and give W3C's CSS WG an idea what we expect from them will.
[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius
-
Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project
FWIW, I know two (partial, kinda) formal specifications of CSS normal flow and float layout, both of which are finished ie dead projects:
[1]: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper....
[2]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius
(not counting the 1990s constraint CSS effort).
The first was merely part of a parallel compiler project and also covers table layout, whereas the second is a Racket (Scheme) program to formulate the HTML doc and CSS rules as a theory for submitting to z3 SMT to solve all kinds of decision problems (it can also produce a rendering).
Not sure that's very helpful; it would be cool if W3C can invest some time into better specs (not just prose).
sciter
- Show HN: Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components
-
Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries
There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com
> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.
It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.
Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.
But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
- Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements
-
Immediate Mode GUI Programming
otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.
[1] https://sciter.com
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
-
Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
https://sciter.com
- Ode to the M1
-
So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)
- Windowing
-- Tabs
-- Menus
-- Painting
-- Animation
-- Text
-The compositor
-Handling input
-- Pointer input
-- Keyboard input
- Accessibility
- Internationalization and localization
- Cross-platform APIs
- The web view
- Native look and feel
On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.
-
Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.
https://sciter.com/
What are some alternatives?
Radpath - Path library for Elixir inspired by Python's pathlib
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
ex_guard - ExGuard is a mix command to handle events on file system modifications
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
sizeable - An Elixir library to make File Sizes human-readable
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
servo-embedding-example - Examples of embedding Servo inside non-browser GL applications.
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
alive2 - Automatic verification of LLVM optimizations
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
wpt - Test suites for Web platform specs — including WHATWG, W3C, and others
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL