Sciter uses JavaScript from now and on

Without too much fanfares Sciter has officially transitioned from TIScript to JavaScript this week. To be precise, there are two Sciter’s at the moment: Sciter.TIS and Sciter.JS. It is just from now and on Sciter is a synonym of Sciter.JS. And so Sciter.JS is the official, mainstream version. But Sciter.TIS is still supported and maintained…

Real End of Flash Era

Sciter v.4.4.4.8 has got native support of <lottie>s (on the picture). Lottie is a compact representation of Adobe After Effects files exported as JSON by using Bodymovin plugin. “Compact” here means that the format contains minimal information needed to render animation. While adding lottie support to Sciter I have realized that lottie actually marks the…

“Styles 2.0” in Sciter and beyond

Major CSS implementation refactoring is happening in Sciter for 4.4.2.xx at the moment. Original CSS implementation architecture in H-SMILE core was established 14 years ago when CSS contained just handful of properties. Currently there are more than 300 of them defined in W3C spec and counting. My initial optimistic implementation was relied on hypothesis that…

10 years of FlexBox’ing

10 years ago we, at W3C-style WG mail list, started discussion of giving CSS at least some flexibility. That was the time of semantic Web battles that showed up in “don’t use <table> for layout purposes” witch-hunt among others. The problem was that CSS did not offer any option to vertically align stuff inside browser…

Maintainable CSS

I have found Maintainable CSS site exceptionally useful for designing maintainable CSS systems. Modular and encapsulated: Styles don’t bleed or cascade without your permission. Any design requirements: Completely flexible to your needs. No tooling required: But you can use tooling if you want to. Easy to learn: Read the guides and see. Any size project:…

Tokenizer + ::mark() = syntax colorizer

Here is selfie of syntax (tiscript) colorizer – the text below is a full source code of syntax highlighting routine. The code has colorized itself: Can your browser do that in 40 lines of code? And here are styles that define style of tokens: plaintext > text::mark(number) { color: brown; } plaintext > text::mark(number-unit) {…

::mark(…) feature is comming

Please consider these tasks: Find all words in text on HTML page and highlight them Syntax highlighting: parse text of <pre> and mark all keywords by changing their color Find all misspelled words in <textarea> highlight them specifically. Currently you can do #1 and #2 by wrapping each text found into <span>s with specific classes…