I loved this walk through back when it came out and even made a ham handed attempt to write the example code in Go <a href="https://github.com/radiofreejohn/gobinson" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/radiofreejohn/gobinson</a><p>It is a bummer it ended with a to be continued that never happened, I remember checking up on it from time to time.
I bet it's possible to achieve layout completeness (in the same vein as turing completeness) with a much simpler markup and styling language.<p>I'm actually more interested in implementing a toy OS or a toy compiler for a toy language because the browser seems to be a more of very specific complex mess of mistakes and legacy choices rather then a serious theoretical concept. Although I'm sure you'll still learn a lot if you implement one.
This was a very useful guide for me a couple years ago. I had to print html documents (thankfully, just a reasonably-well-defined subset) from a .NET Winforms app, but driving a browser to do it was too slow and flaky. So I used the OP as the starting point for a C# layout engine.