Initial Wixel-SMEN Project Summary (Gecko and WebKit)

[BearState]

This project has limited use of the main browser engine, except to recover environment and UI settings and events. Wixel-SMEN does not concern itself with parsing of HTML markup or CSS, nor the creation of the DOM tree. In Gecko, Wixel-SMEN begins to take part in core functions where in Gecko, Frames are constructed and in WebKit, where DOM and Styles are attached. Wixel-SMEN may be overridden by what shall be called non-passive CSS, it must determine whether its functionality is turned on or off and it must locate a declared entry-point wixel. Wixel-SMEN must determine whether screen size is large enough to ignore use of the entry-point wixel, in favor of rendering the entire page or a larger nested wixel. It must accept browser engine UI events which cause wixel navigations. The wixel dictionary and rendering rules effect reflow to the framing tree in gecko and layout of the rendering tree in WebKit. Painting in both Gecko and WebKit is affected by the Wixel Rendering rules. UI events do not change DOM or CSS structures. However, those events do cause a loop-back which causes reflow to be repeated in Gecko, layout to be repeated in WebKit. This loop-back is necessary to the functionality of Semantic Markup Enabled Navigation which is effected by reworking the framing/rendering tree and repainting after each navigation loop-back.