Theoden

Theoden is a toy web browser implementation written in C++. It is a learning project aimed at exploring how basic browser components function, including parsing of HTML and CSS and simple rendering of structured content.

Overview

This project implements a minimal browser engine that can:

• Parse HTML into a DOM model
• Parse simple CSS rules
• Represent document structure and style information
• Render basic content from local HTML/CSS files

The intent is to understand foundational browser internals rather than build a full-featured browser.

Project Structure

Rendering Engine/
├── css.hpp
├── cssParser.cpp
├── cssParser.hpp
├── document.hpp
├── dom/
│   └── dom.hpp
├── example.css
├── example.html
├── htmlParser.cpp
├── htmlParser.hpp
├── main
├── main.cpp

Key Components

• HTML Parser (htmlParser.*) Converts raw HTML text into a structured document object model (DOM).

• CSS Parser (cssParser.*, css.hpp) Reads and interprets simple CSS rules, associating them with DOM elements.

• Document & DOM (document.hpp, dom/) Defines the DOM data structures used to represent elements, attributes, and text nodes.

• Rendering / Execution (main.cpp) Entry point that loads an example HTML/CSS and processes it through the engine.

• Examples (example.html, example.css) Simple demonstration files to exercise the parser and rendering logic.

Current Progress

• Basic parsing of HTML and CSS is implemented.
• A DOM structure representing parsed content is defined.
• There is minimal rendering logic connected to the parsed output.
• The example files showcase how the engine processes markup and style.

Limitations

• No JavaScript support.
• Limited CSS feature coverage.
• Rendering logic is basic and not layout-complete.
• Does not fetch content over network; only local files are processed.

Build & Run

To compile and run the code:

# compile
g++ -std=c++17 Rendering\ Engine/*.cpp -o theoden

# run
./theoden

Replace paths/flags as appropriate for your build environment.

Goals & Future Work

Possible future directions include:

• Expanding CSS selector and property support
• Implementing basic layout algorithms (block layout, inline flow)
• Rendering formatted output beyond structural parsing
• Adding tests for parser and DOM components