alt Hacker News> The current roadmap lists Shadow DOM and CSS Grid as priorities
I've been working on the CSS Grid support. About to land "named grid lines and areas" support which should make a bunch more websites layout correctly.
I'm biased because it's my project, but IMO the approach Servo is using for CSS Grid is pretty cool in that the actual implementation is in an external library (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout), the Zed [2] text editor, and the Bevy [3] game engine.
I'm hopeful that this approach of breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs (which builds upon Servo's earlier work on modular libraries such as Stylo and html5ever) will make it easier for people to get involved in web engine development (as they can understand each piece in isolation), and make it easier for people to create new web engines in future (as they won't have to start completely from scratch).
[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy [1]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz [2]: https://zed.dev [3]: https://bevy.org/
Replies
Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?
> breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs
I love that. Years ago I looked at WebRTC and asked myself, why does it seem like making a crummy Skype knockoff is either 50 lines of JavaScript or a nightmarish week of trying to get half of Chromium to compile in your C++ project?
I think there is a WebRTC Rust crate finally, which is good. Web apps shouldn't be the only beneficiaries of all this investment
Do you not worry that instead it will lead to feature bloat and fragmentation? If you’re going to strike at Google, you need laser focus.
That's so fun to hear, I've been using taffy for layouting my little rusty eink calendar
> (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout)
This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.