A layout engine, or rendering engine, is a software that takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer. A layout engine is typically used for web browsers, email clients, or other applications that require the displaying (and editing) of web contents. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages. ... A digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image as a finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. ... In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ... The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a family of languages which allows one to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted or transformed. ... Nineteen inch (48 cm) CRT computer monitor A computer display, monitor or screen is a computer peripheral device capable of showing still or moving images generated by a computer and processed by a graphics card. ... A computer printer is a computer peripheral device that produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics, usually on paper) from data stored in a computer connected to it. ... A web browser is a software package that enables a user to display and interact with documents hosted by web servers. ... An email client (or mail user agent [MUA]) is a computer program that is used to read and send email. ...
The term "layout engine" only reached popular usage when the Mozilla project designed its web browser's layout engine (Gecko) as a component that was separable from the browser. In other words, the Mozilla layout engine was reusable for web browsers besides Mozilla, and so people began to refer to Gecko as a distinct layout engine rather than merely a part of the web browser. Mozilla is a computer term that has had many different uses, though all of them have been related to Netscape Communications Corporation and its related application software. ... Gecko is the open-source web browser layout engine used in Mozilla, later Netscape releases and several other products. ...
The new layoutengine was developed in parallel with the old, with the intention being to integrate it into Netscape Communicator when it was mature and stable.
After the launch of the Mozilla project in early 1998, the new layoutengine code was released under an open-source license.
For a time, Gecko was used to refer to both the old NGLayout layoutengine and XPFE (cross-platform front-end) — the new XML-based Mozilla user interface, rendered by NGLayout — but it is now used solely to refer to the layoutengine.
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