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Gecko

264 bytes added, 13:05, 4 October 2006
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A gecko is a small to large Japanese lizard. However, in the Mozilla context Gecko refers to the browser layout engine.  What exactly is a layout engine? In essence a layout engine is responsible for the following:* Formatting content such as images, text, HTML, and CSS and displaying them on the screen. In other words, it is responsible for defining the placement rules for documents by parsing them and formatting it accordingly in order to render it on the browser screen. It's functionality is so rich that it is even being used to layout the "Chrome" (i.e. menu bars, scroll bars etc.)  Gecko is:
* open source free software (It was initially created by Netscape Corporation but now its development is stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation.)
* cross-platform (Windows, BSD, Linux and Mac OS X)
* Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
* Resource Description Framework (RDF)
 
Background
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Gecko is written in C++ and offers a rich programming API allowing it to support a variety of nternet related applications. But what exactly is a layout engine? and what does it do?
 
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