Layout Team

The layout team is a long-term engineering team tasked with maintaining, supporting, and improving the layout capabilities of the Chromium Blink rendering engine. This includes line layout, block layout, text, fonts, and high-dpi support. It is distinct from style and paint, both of which are handled by their respective teams.

Team Charter

Our overarching goal is to improve the experience for end users and platform developers alike.

• By offering fast, correct, and compatible layout features supporting the majority of writing systems and scripts.
• By providing layered and powerful APIs for developers.
• By driving the layout capabilities of the web forward through collaboration with web developers, other browser vendors, and standard bodies.
• And finally, by intervening when required. Thereby allowing a better user experience for existing and legacy content.

Big ticket items for 2017

• Schedulable, interruptible engine
• LayoutNG can render ~50% of web content.
• Give framework authors the ability to extend the rendering engine
• Ship at least one CSS Houdini API.
• High quality predictable platform
• Maintain bug SLA
• Full test and design doc coverage.
• Ship CSS Grid.
• Unify scrolling implementation (root layer scrolling).
• Ship OpenType variation support.
• Intersection Observer v2.
• Improve rendering performance
• Improve line layout performance by 20%

 

Team Members

• Emil A Eklund eae SFO (tech lead)
• Stefan Zager szager SFO
• David Grogan dgrogan SFO
• Ian Kilpatrick ikilpatrick MTV
• Steve Kobes skobes MTV
• Aleks Totic atotic MTV
• Gleb Lanbin glebl MTV
• Christian Biesinger cbiesinger NYC
• Morten Stenshorne mstensho OSL
• Karl Anders Øygard karlo OSL
• Dominik Röttsches drott HEL
• Koji Ishi kojii TOK

A large number of other individuals not listed above routinely contribute to our layout code and their impact and contributions should in no way be downplayed. This merely lists the people that formally make up the layout team or have committed to a certain task or project.

If you are looking for someone to review a change to the layout code anyone on the list above should be able to help or connect you with the right person. For questions about the design or implementation of a certain layout sub-system or about layout in general the entire team may be reached through the layout-dev mailing list.

For higher level questions or if you are interested in joining the team, please reach out to Emil.

Design Documents

• LayoutUnit & Subpixel Layout (2012)
• Line Box float -> LayoutUnit transition plan (2014)
• Blink Coordinate Spaces (2015)
• Eliminating Simple Text (2015)
• LayoutObject Tree API Proposal (2015)
• Using Zoom to Implement Device Scale Factor (2015)
• Scroll Anchoring (2016)
• Shaper Driven Line Breaking (2016)
• Root Layer Scrolling (2017)

Meeting Notes

There is a regular weekly stand-up meeting on Mondays at 11:00 PST (14:00 EST, 20:00 CET). Additional meetings are held semi regularly and announced on the layout-dev mailing list.

Recent meetings:

• Monday, August 29, 2016
• Monday, July 18, 2016
• Monday, June 27, 2016

Please see the meeting notes page for notes from previous meetings.

Bugs & Triage Policy

The layout team is responsible for all bugs marked Cr-Blink-Layout and Cr-Blink-Fonts, including sub-labels. Our policy is that all new bugs are to be triaged within a week of being filed and all P-0 and P-1 bugs are to be fixed in time for the next release. This is a relatively new policy and until we have worked down the existing backlog this only applies to new bug reports while we're working our way through the backlog.

• Bug Triage Instructions
• Untriaged bugs
• Open P0 and P1 bugs
• All open bugs
• Project Warden bugs [legacy]

Links

• Readmap & Potential Projects
• Team mailing list
• Profiling Blink using Flame Graphs
• Skia telemetry try bot