LAB / EXPLORATION
Mini Browser / Rendering Engine
Browser Internals and Rendering Experiment
Experimental renderer exploring parsing, layout, styling, and drawing beneath browser interfaces.
PLANNED LAB
Build a deliberately small browser-like renderer to understand what happens beneath normal frontend development. The implementation is planned.
Mini Browser / Rendering Engine
Build a deliberately small browser-like renderer to understand what happens beneath normal frontend development. The implementation is planned.Build a deliberately small browser-like renderer to understand what happens beneath normal frontend development. The implementation is planned.
Purpose & Learning Objectives
Why this project exists and what the implementation should teach.Purpose / Learning
Purpose
Build a deliberately small browser-like renderer to understand what happens beneath normal frontend development.
Learning Objectives
- Parse structured markup into a document representation.
- Represent style information separately from content.
- Calculate simplified box positions and dimensions.
- Paint text and boxes onto Canvas.
- Separate parsing, style, layout, and painting stages.
- Later experiment with a custom document format using the same pipeline.
Technology Plan
Current, planned, legacy, or candidate technologies for this project.Implementation Scope
Planned behaviors, architecture decisions, and evidence this project should produce.
Parser
Turn simplified markup into a tree the renderer owns.- Tokenization.
- Element/text nodes.
- Parent/child relationships.
- Controlled subset rather than full HTML.
Style system
Associate simplified style rules with nodes.- Selectors or direct style mapping.
- Inherited values where useful.
- Explicit unsupported features.
Layout engine
Calculate where boxes and text should be placed.- Block flow.
- Box dimensions.
- Margins/padding.
- Text measurement.
Painter
Draw the calculated layout without delegating final layout to the DOM.- Canvas rectangles.
- Text.
- Clipping/overflow experiments.
- Debug overlays.
Future language experiment
Reuse the renderer for a custom document format.- Define grammar.
- Parse into same internal representation.
- Compare HTML-oriented and custom input.
Project Notes
Implementation context, boundaries, and later expansion.Project Notes
Scope Boundary
This is a teaching renderer, not an attempt to implement web standards completely.
Portfolio Evidence
Expose pipeline diagrams, sample documents, rendered output, and debugging views.
Implementation Sketch
A compact structural example for this project.
Pipeline Sketch
A conceptual stage order for the first renderer.
Example
const documentTree = parse(source);
const styledTree = applyStyles(documentTree, styleRules);
const layoutTree = layout(styledTree, viewport);
paint(layoutTree, canvasContext);