Cassius VS quickjs

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

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).

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

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

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).

It uses service workers to cache static files, by the time it opens up you already free to be offline, try toggle network switch to verify.

It has download link at bottom of the about page ([accdoo.app/about]) which you could then self host it by dropping into any static hosting services.

btw, the Pi feature was by-product from the original App but I won't expand here, if you'd like to learn more, please checkout its two Show HN post (39115559 and 39138957) previously.

[wiki]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_algorithm

[quickjs/pi]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/pi.html

[pi_bigint.js]: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/examples/pi_b...

[accdoo.app/about]: https://accdoo.app/about#releases

[39115559]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39115559

[39138957]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138957

Just go with quickjs, I think this is what you are looking for.

https://bellard.org/quickjs/

QuickJS

I think QuickJS, written in C, is a user-"friendly" starting point for implementing ECMA-262. Documentation QuickJS Javascript Engine.

There is a readme on the project's main page: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

The newsworthy bit here is that the activity seemed to have stalled for year or two and now Fabrice pushed a few fixes and made a new release.

Just to demonstrate GitHub repositories do not necessarily reflect upon a programmers' body of work, Fabrice Bellard has one (1) repository published on GitHub, quickjs. Compare the list of work on Bellard's home page https://bellard.org/.

> I am still confused, it's a JavaScript runtime intended to be deployed to JavaScript/Wasm runtimes?

Seemingly.

> Why does a JavaScript runtime need a JavaScript runtime?

Because if you want to create a Service Worker server for CloudFlare Workers and other JavaScript/Wasm runtimes, that's the only option for doing that AFAIK.

FWIW, this isn't a new idea. For example, Figma uses QuickJS (https://bellard.org/quickjs/) for their plug-in runtime: https://www.figma.com/blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/