microui VS sciter

There is also microui, which I like[0].

Which I forked to work with SDL2[1], no guarantees. It's fun to hack on.

[0]https://github.com/rxi/microui

[1]https://github.com/kennethrapp/microui

> I'm convinced that using an embedded browser engine to render app UI is the future.

Sciter exists: https://sciter.com/

And it indeed is great for UI.

I think Sciter is probably the better comparison:

https://sciter.com/

It is a ground-up implementation of HTML and CSS rendering. IIRC it used to have its own programming language but now uses JS.

I’ve long been interested in this kind of thing but haven’t actually played with Sciter in depth. Used to be that the licensing was a concern but looking at the site now it seems the terms have changed to be much more flexible.

Seems a good place to mention https://sciter.com/

It's been on HN loads of times.

A "browser" engine but very narrow scope. Works a treat for LOB type apps.

> 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