Humourously enough, when I worked on a team that was writing a graphical web browser for mobile in the late 90's [1], they used a display list for rendering.

The reasoning was somewhat different, web pages were essentially static (we didn't do "DHTML"), if the page rendering process could generate an efficient display list, then the page source could be discarded, and only the display list needed to be held in memory, this rendering could then be pipelined with reading the page over the network, so the entire page was never in memory.

Full Disclosure: while I later wrote significant components of this browser (EcmaScript, WmlScript, SSL, WTLS, JPEG, PNG), the work I'm describing was entirely done by other people!

[1] - I joined in 97, the first public demo was at GSM World Congress Feb 98