sciter VS ladybird

> 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/

A browser is not a web app, it doesn't have a strict separation of "frontend" and "backend" in the same sense that a web app would have; the lines are drawn quite differently. The rendering engine is never "just" the rendering engine; you can't abstract or swap it without tremendous effort.

If you'd like to learn more about how a web browser project would organize its internal architecture, but are discouraged by the complexity of Chromium, Firefox, etc. I'd recommend source diving Ladybird (https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird), NetSurf (https://www.netsurf-browser.org/), or Dillo (https://www.dillo.org/).

I'd love to see a stable version of a brand new web browser, not based on Blink or Gecko, such as Ladybird or Flow Browser. Competition is a good thing.

note, native Windows is not currently supported:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird/issues/113

Google is dominating, pushing through Android and via Googles-Webservices and Microsoft is using it now. A reason to worry because developing new web-engine requires an big effort. For instance Microsoft only allows usage of Microsoft Teams Web with a webbrowser based upon Blink. So were back in 2002?

WebKit features also WebKit2Gtk (Epiphany) and Qt5-webkit (Otter) with native integration. They use the native toolkits, which is an advantage! Interaction with the open-source community around WebKit seems rather good and the engine is integrated by others. Gecko seem not to be integrated by others, but by forks only? You remember when Chrome was considered slick and fast? Originally Google used the native toolkit on every platform but know they use an own solution on every platform, like Firefox.

Maybe there is a new kid on the block:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

Funny you should ask: https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

I've not heard of Ladybird before. True, it's a free and open browser engine and a very interesting project!