Many browsers now have AI agents built into them. For example, Chrome has Gemini-in-Chrome, and Atlas has ChatGPT. When a user is on a website and then opens the built-in browser AI agent, the AI agent will see the WebMCP tool calls for that website and be able to call them.
Dialog was literally rushed into all browsers without bothering to fix the issues that plagued it for a decade. Some of them were fixed post-factum because now you couldn't ignore these issues.
The <dialog> element is fully styleable, including its backdrop (the MDN article explains how for the latter). In Chrome you can also fully style animations opening and closing a <dialog> or popover.
As someone unfamiliar with the topic I think that it was easily digestable and interesting. I have not read the previous chapters but this caught my interest so I am planning to.
In my view, a critical part of really learning how something as complicated as a browser works is by trying to build it yourself. That's why our book is oriented around building a browser as you go.
I'm the rendering lead for Chrome, and know quite a lot about how it works. I also recently wrote a series of articles about the new rendering architecture of Chromium, see here:
Pavel is a professor at the University of Utah and has extensively studied CSS from an academic point of view. He also has a lot of experience teaching the material and making it accessible to students.
So far, my co-author Pavel has taught from this book multiple times (including this semester). In the spring at least one other university will offer a course. We'll list all known courses offerings on the website.
Also, if anyone would like to teach from this book, please get in touch!
