dom VS Servo

in plain htmx, you can target an area that doesn't disrupt a playing video (e.g. the comments box appending to the comments) or you can use a morphing algorithm that disrupts the DOM less.

i have my own morphing algorithm (and a corresponding htmx plugin that allows you to use it) called idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/

i've also been working with the chrome team to get a feature added they are calling "atomic moves":

https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/1255

this would allow us to move elements around in the DOM without losing things like play state or focus or whatever

very excited for this last idea, I think it will be a huge boon for the web in general, not just for htmx

What I said in my previous comment is observably true. Try making a demo where it isn't.

> A DOM node is a living mutable thing, but the JavaScript object representing that node is not.

The JavaScript object is mutable. The first example in the article shows this.

> That is also why a node list is not an array.

Modern APIs on the web return platform arrays (eg JavaScript arrays). https://webidl.spec.whatwg.org/#js-sequence - here's where the WebIDL spec specifies how to convert a sequence to a JavaScript array.

I'm fully aware of NodeList. There's a reason the spec calls them "old-style" https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#old-style-collections

> I can understand how this is confusing if you have never operated without a framework, but otherwise it’s really straightforward

Sighhhhhh. I've been a web developer for over 20 years, and spent a decade on the Chrome team working on web platform features. Most of my career has been on the low-level parts of the platform.

Could it be possible that people are disagreeing with you, not because they're stupid, but because you're in the wrong? Please try to be open minded. Try creating some demos that test your opinions.

Domenic Denicola (the man who ruined promises) probably will as well.

https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/67

I'm pretty sure it is, since I get "TypeError: nodes[i].parentNode.href is undefined" and "TypeError: $mainmenu.parent(...).get(...) is undefined" errors on both Pale Moon and LibreWolf. Which is part of Shadow/DOM, and originated from google (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/). Not sure when this particular thing was introduced, since it's a "living standard"/experimental feature (https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/).

JSX chose to align names to the DOM spec [0]. Same for htmlFor and friends.

[0] https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#ref-for-dom-element-classname%E...

You can see why I say this here: https://dom.spec.whatwg.org

The product logos in this article's cover image include different languages and technologies some of which are still relevant for web development today: HTML, CSS, JavaScript / ES / TypeScript (and the DOM), SVG, PDF, PHP, SQL (mySQL, MariaDB), mongoDB, Node.js (the most successful server-side implementation of JavaScript so far).

Thanks for the shout-out! I think I mention this in the talk, but note that YMMV. I designed that benchmark as a kind of "worst-case scenario" where shadow DOM / scoped styles really show a benefit. Depending on your CSS rules, DOM size, and amount of thrashing, the perf benefit could be small to large.

Also, it's still possible to shoot yourself in the foot, especially if you have a large/complex stylesheet repeated across multiple shadow roots. (Not because of the repetition – that's optimized in browsers [1] – but rather because of the number of DOM nodes affected.)

That said, I still think the perf benefits of shadow DOM have been undersung. And Declarative Shadow DOM makes it way more useful.

[1]: https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/831#issuecomment-585489...

We luh-luh-luv you! They gestated and nurtured the spec. They fought over bike sheds! All for us!!

Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine

> Is there any easy to use/hack HTML layouting engine where I could experiment with custom CSS attributes and bridge that gap? Would anything from Servo be suitable?

Servo could be used for this. You'd want to add support for parsing the CSS properties themselves to the style crate in https://github.com/servo/stylo and then the layout implementation to the layout2020 crate in https://github.com/servo/servo. You do effectively get a whole browser though.

I'm currently working on building a lighter weight / hackable layout engine based on a combination of https://github.com/servo/stylo (for css parsing and selector resolution), https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (for box-level layout) and https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (for flow/inline layout). I expect to have something decent in around 6 months

Neither of these setups currently have any support for pagination though.

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers.

It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs filed).

I haven't messed with it yet but from looking into it, this should absolutely work.

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-...

don't know, there was a downtime in 2021 and 22 but since 2023, contributions look back to where it was before .. https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

1. Servo

It won't don't worry. There already are forks, for the worst case scenario. And Servo is on its way. Not yet ready, but it will be. Originally, from Mozilla kitchen.

To pain broad strokes, the layout phase (~= take the HTML, take the CSS, determine the position and size of boxes) is largely sequential in production browser engine today. Selector matching (~= what CSS applies to what element) is parallel in Firefox today, via the Stylo Rust crate originally developed in the research browser engine Servo. Servo can do parallel layout in some capacity (but doesn't implement everything), https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep... is an interesting and recent document on the matter.

Parallel layout is generally considered to be a complex engineering problem by domain experts.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... is a really cool article that is related, that is a few years old but what it says is largely correct today.