HTML Rendering Engine

The browser has various layers which speak to each other. Here we are mainly concerned with the rendering engine layer.

Displaying content in the browser window is a multi-step process.

To retrieve an HTML document, the browser fetches the asset. It is received in bytes, similar to machine code. These bytes are transformed into tokens which are parsed to create the DOM.

Before html we had xhtml strict. With xhtml strict, if a dev made a mistake, the end user would see a big nasty error in the browser window.

Tokens are converted into nodes which are attached to the parse tree.

The parse tree is later converted into the DOM tree.