tersenet VS cosmic-text

Is it able to show actual videos or is that just to make the demo more interesting and inserted externally?

I would like to combine something like this with https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet or some of those ideas.

Here's an idea I had that is a bit related https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

Although I may never have time to actually work on it. Especially since it will be a complete waste of time unless I can get a huge number of people to adopt it.

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs.

The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it.

Here is my somewhat related pet project: Tersenet. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

I loved playing around with Gemini. Something loosely along those lines can definitely work. Who knows what will become popular in the future. Extreme web page bloat leaves the door open.

Here are a couple of other alternative ideas for the web:

https://freenet.org/

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)

I might make a new version of this http://vintagesimulator.com with VR support.

Or actually build this https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

What I have been thinking about for a few years is a SaaS that takes a video stream and in real-time outputs a 3d reconstruction with separate posed meshes, or maybe even some type of (CAD-like) boundary representation.

It should be possible to use NeRFs to create a VR "teleportation" application.

Also I think that VR or mixed reality user interfaces should be 3D and possibly haptic, and that doing everything in 2d windows in VR doesn't make much sense. So there will eventually be an OS for mixed reality that has 3D widgets or components that can interact and have interesting interfaces.

It will also soon be possible to "clone" a person using dynamic NeRF-like technology combined with new multimodal models of behavior and cognition. Such as take every script from the Colbert show, feed it into a model that combines a LLM with gestures and some visual/spatial correspondence. Automatically create a late night monologue.

Seems really interesting so I have been Googling to try to figure out what you are talking about. Is the Hydraulic product a way to easily deploy GraalVM software? And maybe by adding some type of search and document browsing capability, it can become a new type of web browser?

Could you take a look at my comment in this thread and also at https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

I have not totally updated that but my current thinking is that we really want to finish deconstructing the overlay operating system that the "web browser" has become. For example, we should actually not bundle the information browsing program and application VM together, but rather have a simple standard for them to work together. Such as, the info browser can save the list of the application binaries to a file that the VM system knows to watch.

We also actually want to further decompose this into a multilevel window manager concept. On the first level, just a rule that applications save and reload window layouts.

I really think it should be a goal to standardize on some web assembly extension with simple UI features like canvas or framebuffer and keyboard events.

We should be working on an alternative paradigm. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

Wow hello famous person.

This weekend I got back to doing a little bit of work on my TerseNet concept, inspired by one of your articles "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n..." and things like the Gemini Protocol with the idea of combating monopolies by making protocols simple enough for the average programmer or small team to implement them.

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet -- still just some ideas, not an actual prototype.

> 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.

I maintain a web layout library that is designed to be integrated into other software:

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

It needs to be combined with a text layout engine (such as https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text), and it doesn't support everything yet (notable features that are currently missing: "float", "display: inline-block", "box-sizing: content-box", "position: static"). But we have Block, Flexbox and CSS Grid support with more on the way.

All of these projects have in common that they use Taffy (the project that I work on!) for box-level layout (which currently gives them block, flexbox, and grid layout) , and are either using or planning to use cosmic-text for text/inline layout. This gives you a decent first approximation of web layout, but it's not perfect and there are major features like float, display: inline-block, position: static, box-sizing: content-box missing. Not to mention that none of these implementations currently resolve CSS selectors, so you are effectively limited to inline styles (if you're interested in something in that direction then you may be interested in https://github.com/vizia/vizia).

You might be interested in the combination of Taffy [0] which handles box-level browser layout (block, flexbox, grid, etc) and Cosmic Text [1] which handles text-level layout and basic text editing functionality.

Integrating them into browsers while retaining accessibility could be tricky. But in they're general they're relatively small standalone libraries implementing most of the layout algorithms that browsers implement (although there are currently a few key missing features like laying out "inline-block" items in line with text).

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

[1]: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text

By integrating the Cosmic Text library from https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text, Bevy Cosmic Edit enhances Bevy's UI system with the following features:

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text that does text layout and rasterisation with full support for things like CJK scripts and emojis)

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)