Rendering?

[axefrog]

This is a fantastic project and I can definitely think of more than one place I'm interested in applying it in the not-too-distant future! What are your thoughts on the amount of work to take what you've done and render it to a surface? One application I can see for it is as the basis for user interface rendering for .Net-based games. Currently, to leverage the power of HTML and CSS for a game, you really need to embed something like Awesomium or CEF. Having a completely managed library available that can do all the work of rendering to an offscreen surface and being able to process a stream of input events (either simulated or otherwise) would be really powerful.

[FlorianRappl]

Thanks for the kind comment and your interest in the project. Yes, rendering is on my radar and I will start writing a simple renderer in the near future. First experiments tell me that it is possible and quite nicely working, however, I am not sure about the performance. Nevertheless, the original intention of the project was to provide another UI framework based on HTML and CSS with tight C# integration. That is still far away, and currently my main aim is to provide a really useful library that can easily be seen as a headless browser.

[h82258652]

You mean a browser core?! Even it is too hard, I hope it can come true. And then we can run it in any platform with .net framework.
How to render is a big problem, use local controls is a not good idea, SlimDX may be a good choice.

[Suchiman]

On my journey through the internet i've found this project: https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/
It's a little bit outdated on HTML and CSS support but it seems to be still developed and i wondered wether you could collaborate.

[FlorianRappl]

I think it was a year ago when I reached out to the maintainer of the project. He, however, refused due to time problems. Instead he improved his parser and then stopped maintaining the project actively. Nevertheless, the code definitely serves as a good starting point and I took one or the other idea from it. I actually have a (non-GH synced) branch that implements a renderer, which will be merged with v0.8 or shortly afterwards.

But definitely a good comment, since I like the HtmlRenderer project.

[jogibear9988]

seems the origian author gives maintenance away: http://theartofdev.com/html-renderer/
He also seems to have switched to github: https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer

[FlorianRappl]

Yep that is all true but please note that the links you are giving are not referring to the original author. Arthur Teplitzki was / is the current maintainer after taking the project over from Jose Manuel Menendez Poo. He started it all (and then Arthur did a great job in optimization and de-coupling).
But the project itself is incompatible with AngleSharp. It has its own (non-HTML5 non-CSS3) parsers and CSSOM included. Nevertheless it is a very nice project and certainly showcases some very good points about a possible HTML renderer implementation in .NET.

FlorianRappl I would like to work on a separate project from this that would be a truly pure C# browser core similar to rust/servo, I would love to open source it and include this as the parser, would you be interested in working together?

[FlorianRappl]

Yep, I would definitely be interested!

I've created a repo here: https://github.com/PorterX2Pro/Velocity
We can discuss how we want to go about layout and rendering of the engine there.

[Suchiman]

@PorterX2Pro that might be just nitpicking but i wouldn't consider a library relying on OpenGL "pure" c#, it won't work without opengl hardware, drivers and support from opentk for the current platform.