A chronology of discussions on floating elements support, (or the floating element blues!) IMHO the number one missing feature of Dillo now is support for floating elements, which makes the rendering of majority of web sites unappealing / unreadable. So I became curious to see what sort of discussions has been going on in the past regarding this issue. It appears that this has been a goal for some time, at least as far back as 2004. Interestingly no one mentioned it in between 2004 and 2008, but from 2008 there has been interest in it again. Here's a little chronology I've put together from the discussions on the mailing list. I hope it raises interest in the community to finally address this feature. Oct 1, 2004 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2004-October/002218.html Jorge mentions that bug#598 is because Dillo doesn't support floating elements. I couldn't find bug#598 in the bugtracker page. Nov 6, 2004 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2004-November/002414.html<http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-May/006415.html> Jorge makes a priority task list of remaining issues. (This is before porting to FLTK2.) Based on this list support for floating objects should be added to DwPage. There Jorge claims "This is a bit difficult, since I'm not yet able to estimate the work." April 20, 2008 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2008-April/004101.html Jorge: "Planning for CSS, floating objects and TABS.(these are important features to a nice browsing experience)". Later Enrico mentions that he plans to write a universal but small CSS parser as a separate library to fix the missing CSS issue. Jorge suggests he look at RCSS by Raph Levien. July 3, 2008 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2008-July/004652.html As part of future of dillo2, Jorge: "In the near future, I'd like to have CSS and proper floating text rendering (DIV element), plus an API as a help browser." Nobody follows it up in that thread. Oct 22, 2008 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2008-October/005274.html Johannes proposes a plan to support CSS, and in parallel to make floating objects work in dw/textblocks.cc. Jorge mentions in reply that "currently I don't know which of these two is more urgent: * floats in textblock, * DIV element. I'd say DIV." Nov 7, 2008 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2008-November/005381.html Jorge mentions that Sebastian is apparently working on floating objects support. Jan 5, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-January/005608.html Jorge: "BTW, after we merge CSS into the main branch, it seems like floating objects will be the highest priority. Dillo rendering would improve a lot by using both!" Mar 4, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-March/006122.html Jorge mentions as a future goal: "Improve rendering: especially floating objects and the already good-looking CSS." May 10, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-May/006415.html Some discussion (with no clear conclusion) on "treatment of white spaces inside text blocks" between corvid, Jorge and Johannes. Jorge mentions that it will need changes to the textblock and that it is a task for dillo 2.2. Corvid hopes Johannes fixes it, Johannes hopes someone else fixes it, and Jorge mentions that Sebastian wanted to fix it but there's no news of him and apparently he has to tackle it himself. Jorge: "I remember doing this with table rendering algorithms, and it took months, but the end result was worth the effort. If somebody here wants to help along the way, it'd be more than welcomed." June 23, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-June/006645.html Jorge: "The column layout problem is mainly a lack of implementation of floating elements in the textblock. it is one of the top priorities for the next release (if not the topmost). We'll work on it and try to fix it. We're yet to find out how much work it will be." Oct 14, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-October/006918.html Jorge: "Right now, I see these ones very close: 1.Rendering of floating objects.(very visible for users)" Dec 11, 2009 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2009-December/007077.html TIm and Johannes give it s shot, but the issue remains unfixed. Johannes: "The real problem is what to do with those values. We need a way to render floating elements in dw/*" Oct 13, 2010 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2010-October/007760.html Jorge mentions: "Personally I believe the collapsing model and its baroque combinations are seldom used in the Web. Most sites are structured around floating DIVs these days,and even the last SPEC more or less recognizes the problem." Jan 26, 2011 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2011-January/008022.html Benjamin Johnson: "- Twelve years and three toolkits later, there's still no support for such basic functionality as floating elements (HTML "align=" or CSS "float:")." May 26, 2011 http://lists.auriga.wearlab.de/pipermail/dillo-dev/2011-May/008352.html Jorge mentions: "Dillo doesn't have support for "floating elements" yet. The web has become full of them because of slow rendering of tables. Well, we're supposed to work on it in the near future. For the meanwhile, you'll see weird "unrolled" pages."