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I am REALLY curious how a web page is parsed into a DOM tree, then how the tree is rendered in a web browser. Namely,how does layout engine work?

I guess whether reading source code of a simple web browser (Webkit is too hard for me now. ) is a feasible choice? Thanks

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Reading the source code for anything that implements current web standards is going to be a daunting task, no matter how simple the browser seems. Even CSS1 defines some rather complex rules for layout. – Matti Virkkunen Mar 5 '11 at 15:47
As Matti said, reading the source code is "a daunting task". I want to know if there are other choices to achieve the goal. thanks – Matt Elson Mar 6 '11 at 2:55
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Parsing a web page into a DOM tree isn't terribly difficult to understand since (well-formed) HTML is already in a tree structure. So I don't think there's much to it except when you want to also annotate things like CSS, conditional code, and scripts into your tree.

Layout and rendering is a much more challenging problem to work out. If you're not ready to dive directly in the code, you can read their docs:

WebKit Layout and Rendering

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