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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>At some point I've realized that much of the complexity and resource requirements of web browsers comes from JavaScript.

I am wondering how much of this is true?

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Indeed, CSS is so massive it has long been a collection of standards. Good luck implementing all that.

the author describes how their render-once approach lets them implement CSS in a simpler way since they don't need to retain information for arbitrary dynamic changes in the stylesheets and content

they also probably don't implement most of CSS

I guess this implies that rescaling the window, or rotating your phone, will not update the view. Then you'd have to reload the page. That trade-off seems okay to me.

Constrained features can work great in certain niches, imagine using this in a kiosk (where resizing isn't possible).

Yeah, the layout would still resize but it could be non-ideal in some cases as it would be based on media queries for another width.

For the rotation I could process a second layout on the background and switch to it instantly if rotated. Similarly hover effects will be limited. Things affecting visibility of the blocks/layers should work (for menus), small adjustments of layouted text too, but anything that is more complicated won't be. It currently uses a hardcoded hover effect for links.

I believe Netscape worked like this back in the day. (ETA: as in, resizing the window would reload the page.)

Resizing would just reflow (ie re-render it) the page, not reload it.

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