[throwaway894345]

With respect to the latter, I agree that it seems unlikely that the project would attract users. Maybe it’s my own ignorance, but I don’t know what kind of apps (besides web browsers) would want just the web rendering engine and not various other components in a web browser. What are the responsibilities of a “web rendering engine” anyway? How tightly coupled is it to the DOM? Does it “own” the DOM, or is that owned by some other component in the browser? In the latter case, how are the relevant aspects of the DOM communicated to servo? And does the rest of the web engine query servo for things (e.g., “what are the exact coordinates of this <div>?”)? If this engine ends up not being so web-specific, then maybe it could be used as a replacement for Skia, more or less.

[akiselev]

You send Servo raw display lists, which is a format tailored specifically to represent the DOM but it acts like a generic slicing compositor in practice. It's not coupled in the classical sense - the display lists represent shapes, colors, stacks, rounded borders, etc..

It's more like Skia and can be used to develop GUI frameworks (which is exciting because Servo is Rust and Rust's GUI story is still in its early stages).

[tannhaeuser]

Thanks for that explanation. From the website, it wasn't quite clear to me (and still isn't tbh) whether servo is merely a rendering or also a CSS layout (+ parsing etc) engine.

[mst]

The Servo CSS engine is what powers Stylo to handle CSS in Firefox Quantum.

[szundi]

Very true, just wanted to find out what it is and not easy.

[throwaway894345]

Thanks for clarifying. This is exciting indeed! Are you aware of usage outside of browsers?