sciter VS caniuse

> 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/

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

I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:

https://sciter.com

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.

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/

Safari is the only browser that doesn't support extending HTML element

https://caniuse.com/?search=Custom%20Elements

You forgot to mention (Web)Workers. This is explicit creation, management, and communication with additional threads within JavaScript. What's more, they've been around in JavaScript longer than the V8 engine has even existed!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

https://caniuse.com/?search=webworkers

Do you happen to know where can I check out the cutoff version for each browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm doesn't have it (or other things like WasmGC for that matter)

(https://caniuse.com/) A handy tool for checking the browser compatibility of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features. Can I Use provides up-to-date support tables for various web technologies across different browsers.

Caniuse

Can I Use (https://caniuse.com/)

> Is it though?

In my experience it's the buggiest browser out of the big three, and is often missing basic features like e.g.:

https://caniuse.com/?search=opus

Supported in Firefox for *12 years* now, in Chrome for 10, still no support in Safari.

They only "support" Opus audio in their special snowflake '.caf' container, which is super buggy and the last time I checked no open source program could even generate Opus '.caf' files that could be played by Safari on all Apple platforms. I ended up writing a custom converter which takes a standard '.opus' file and remuxes it on-the-fly (I only store '.opus' files on my server) into Safari-compatible '.caf' files, taking special care to massage it so that it avoids all of their demuxer/decoder bugs. You shouldn't have to do this to have cross-browser high quality audio!

Well I'll be! In my mind I had this clear picture of Firefox implementing it.

It correct, it was only Chrome: https://caniuse.com/?search=html%20import