This is a big achievement, congrats! A lot of time must have been put into this I am sure. And you are also making a spreadsheet product AND a PDF (preview?) product? How do you combine it?
Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or
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Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#12Super cool! Nice job, chearon :)
Wow thanks! Seeing Ladybird progress kept me motivated!
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#13Could I use this together with Pixi.JS ?
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#14Are you planning to add support for the missing standard tags like img and table (both very useful for pdf rendering)?
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#15why not ship a desktop application at this point with support for a special schema? i can understand the abuse for server side rendering, but at this poit you pretty much have a bad browser engine. running inside a 2d hack in a browser engine. sigh.
Why re-invent the wheel with a special schema when CSS2 is a solid standard and widely understood? Is there no room in the world for rendering implementations between nothing at all and full-spec web browser with all the bells and whistles?
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#16I wonder if there’s something opposite — an abstraction for the Web to provide some layout rules that are more sane than CSS.
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#17Feels a bit like history repeating (well, rhyming) with the time back when Java was "the language of web applets" and then Sun created the Hotjava browser and confusion reached the point where minds simply blank out. Few technological novelties have been forgotten more decidedly than Hotjava. Despite marking an intersection of two technological fields (browsers and the JVM) that have shown extreme staying power through the last quarter century.
But the idea of using html for text styling has stuck, Swing UI do text styling with html (and rudimentary css!) to this day. Html would not be a lingua franca if its use was limited to the equivalent of native speakers (browsers).
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#18I worry that this sort of technology is going to lead to webapps that aren't really what we've grown to think of as "the web" but which will instead be closer to a VNC window where you just see pixels and can't interact with anything or see how stuff works in devtools.
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#19This is an amazing piece of work. Thanks for making this open-source.
The default way of generating beautiful PDFs in the backend these days is, running a headless browser and using browser APIs to turn HTML/CSS into PDFs. And apparently, it's a bit costly running instances of browser in the server and scale it properly for huge workloads.
This is literally a game changer. Now it's possible to design PDFs using HTML/css and generate them without the browser overhead!
Re: Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
#20I would be very much interested in articles on how to write a CSS layout engine from scratch