Developer:Design

High-level Overview

This is a very abstract and high-level overview of gngr. Probably also applicable to most other browsers.

Typical flow

1. User enters a URL in the Navigation Window
2. Request Engine fetches the URL and the content is passed to the appropriate parser. The Request Engine uses the Persistence modules to get/set the cookies, and to cache requests.
3. Any dependent resources are fetched as well (Images, CSS, Frames, etc) through the Request Engine.
4. After parsing, an HTML DOM or CSS AST is created in memory.
5. The HTML DOM and CSS AST are used by the layout and rendering modules to display content back on the Navigation Window.
6. The Javascript engine allows scripts to interact with the DOM and CSS DOM APIs.

Further reading

• For a brief introduction to how CSS engines work, see the first part of this article by Lin Clark.