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CSS CSS Foundations Advanced Selectors Pseudo-Classes: :nth-child

Sekhar Reddy
Sekhar Reddy
1,141 Points
Posted by Sekhar Reddy
Sekhar Reddy
1,141 Points

How the browsers understand HTML and CSS?

Are there any built in compilers for HTML and CSS in browsers? If so what they are and how they function?

David White
David White
Courses Plus Student 2,248 Points
David White
David White
Courses Plus Student 2,248 Points

Great topic! I would not have thought to ask this question myself, but glad that you did ;)

3 Answers

James Ingmire
James Ingmire
11,901 Points
James Ingmire
James Ingmire
11,901 Points

Firefox, Chrome and Safari are built upon two rendering engines. Firefox uses Gecko - a "home made" Mozilla rendering engine. Both Safari and Chrome use Webkit.

Webkit is an open source rendering engine which started as an engine for the Linux platform and was modified by Apple to support Mac and Windows. See http://webkit.org/ for more details.

A more detailed link of how the rendering etc takes place

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

> Both Safari and Chrome use Webkit.

Traditional this was true along with the Android browser.

However as of Chrome 28 & Android 4.4 they now use the Blink engine which is a fork of the Webkit engine.

  • Opera version 14 and below uses the Presto engine. As of Opera uses Blink as of version 15.
  • Internet Explorer (all versions) uses the Trident engine.
Sekhar Reddy
Sekhar Reddy
1,141 Points
Sekhar Reddy
Sekhar Reddy
1,141 Points

Thanks for the detailed answer...clears my doubt

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

Browsers use whats known as parsing to "read" the code and then use rendering engines to display it on screen. Its a pretty complicated topic. A quick google search came up with this tutorial which looks like a pretty good tutorial on the topic

James Ingmire
James Ingmire
11,901 Points
James Ingmire
James Ingmire
11,901 Points

It is an interesting topic, how the different words make sense now like webkit etc, put your coding into more context when typing. Enjoyed reading about it.