I was a contributor to a little pair of libraries called KHTML and KJS, a HTML renderer and JavaScript interpreter. Joined about a year into the project and while I didn't lay the foundations I helped improve the DOM and JS support a fair bit.
People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser engine becoming prominent was fantasy.
Then Apple decided they wanted do a browser and looked around at what open source engines were available they could use as a starting point. Thus was born WebKit [1].
I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it". Most of the time they turn out to be right. But not always.
Do you have any insights into how someone should approach a renderer today for HTML and CSS 2.1 rasterization?
Tiled rendering seems to be what all the major renderers use, but the layers of abstraction they utilize to get there are so dense they're unreadable without extensive amounts of time.
People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser engine becoming prominent was fantasy.
Then Apple decided they wanted do a browser and looked around at what open source engines were available they could use as a starting point. Thus was born WebKit [1].
I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it". Most of the time they turn out to be right. But not always.
[1] https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197104218786&w=2
Edit: Here's an interesting presentation by Lars Knoll and George Staikos on the history of the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0