The Chromium-based browsers Chrome, Opera and Samsung Internet all support it, with Firefox and Safari working on their implementation.
Houdini meaning full#
From here, it goes to 'proposed recommendation' and then 'W3C recommendation', where it starts to achieve full browser support.Ĭurrently, the forerunner is the Paint API which is at candidate recommendation level. This is where we start to see wider browser support. From there, it gets refined further before reaching 'candidate recommendation' level.Ī specification marked as a candidate recommendation can start to gather feedback from implementors - in this case browser vendors.
If enough of a consensus is reached, an initial draft specification known as a 'working draft' is created. All the APIs follow the strict W3C standardisation process. The APIs have been worked on for the past few years, with each one being jointly developed by all members of the Houdini task force. While not every website will use these new APIs directly, they allow frameworks and libraries the opportunity to level out browser inconsistencies. They also open up new opportunities to create effects not previously possible. The aim of Houdini is to open up CSS and allow developers to apply these polyfills further along the pipeline and speed things up. This makes repetitive changes near the start of the pipeline, which results in poor performance. If we want a visual effect on a site that the browser does not support natively we instead need to add JavaScript and HTML with polyfills. To improve the performance of a website, we should always focus on optimising the critical render path. With all the elements painted, it sticks them together into one page in a process called compositing. From there, it turns those into pixels in a step called painting.
Firstly, the browser reads through the content and builds a structure known as a render tree, which is then used to calculate where things should appear on the page in a l ayout step.