Off to North Carolina (WWW2010) and Boston/Providence

Ras and I mostly ironed out our talk on mechanizing and parallelizing/optimizing CSS engines for browsers and our other talk on secure mashup abstractions and mechanisms is settling. Not sure who else will be at WWW2010, but worst-case scenario I foresee excessive sweet tea, historical linguistics analysis, and layout engine hacking as a reprieve from all this powerpoint and latex nonsense.

No significantly cool new results lately due to all this slide making. Working with Adam, who we're doing automatic incrementalization of CSS with, I realized that I can encode tables and floats in a fairly restricted attribute grammar language, so that was quite a relief. Quals proposal, here I come!

Fun test of the day

Had a super useful meeting with David Baron: my interpretation of minimum and preferred widths in CSS was pretty close to the intended meaning ('intrinsic' widths computable in one upwards, or synthesized and parallel, pass). CSS, as I dig deeper, does seem to be mostly linear (or, in the parallel case, sublinear).

Tables mostly make sense. Below is a fun test case: is the div in the first cell 50px or 100px? Table row heights are the max of the minimum and specified height, but that says nothing of what the percent of the contents are calculated from ('available height'): I would think the true height, but it might be the specified height (which improves complexity, I believe). Anyways, ponder (and see how different browsers interpret it differently):

<table style="width: 200px">
<tr>
<td style="height: 50px; background-color: red"><div style="background-color: blue; height: 100%"></div></td>
<td style="height: 100px; background-color: red"><div style="background-color: green; height: 50px"></div></td>
</tr>
</table>

Testing, parallelization of table layout, and some sort of sociolinguistics scheming tomorrow. Should be good..