Writing A Web Browser (Part 2)

So when I was writing the first iteration of the tiny web browser I looked around on the Internet for stories from other people who had done the same sort of thing, so that I could hopefully avoid some of the dumber mistakes people had made, and if I was very lucky, perhaps I might even pick up some tricks to make my implementation smaller or faster. Sadly, though, I found nothing. So I forged ahead with my design, and said that when I was done, I would put my experiences up so that other people didn't have to repeat my mistakes, and could possibly learn from what I did correctly.

The first thing I think I did correctly was to break the stream up into elements, all of which had content to paint, and all of which had a bitfield of formatting flags. In my gadget, I would figure out the bounds for any given element, splitting a long bit of content up into several lines each with their own bounds. When the time came to paint the html, I would just loop through the elements, set the colour and font based on the format flags, and draw the string at the bounds. This made the drawing extremely fast, which was a good thing.