End-to-end page loading: navigate URL to rendered page #78

Phase 8 — Resource Loading + Character Encoding + Real Page Loading#

Implement the full end-to-end pipeline from URL navigation to rendered page.

Requirements#

Wire together all Phase 8 components into the browser crate's navigation flow:

1. URL input → parse URL (url crate)
2. Fetch → ResourceLoader fetches HTML (net + encoding crates)
3. Parse HTML → tokenize and build DOM (html crate)
4. Load subresources → fetch <link> stylesheets and <img> images in parallel where possible
5. Style → parse CSS, match selectors, compute styles (css + style crates)
6. Layout → generate layout tree (layout crate)
7. Render → paint to display list, rasterize to bitmap (render + text + image crates)
8. Display → present bitmap in window (platform crate)

Specific Integration Work#

• Modify browser main loop to accept a URL argument: cargo run -p we-browser -- https://example.com
• Connect ResourceLoader to the HTML/CSS/image loading pipeline
• Ensure encoding detection flows through the pipeline (HTTP charset → BOM → meta prescan)
• Handle the case where subresources fail to load (graceful degradation)
• Basic error page for network failures

Acceptance Criteria#

• cargo run -p we-browser -- https://example.com loads and renders the page
• External CSS stylesheets are applied
• Images are displayed
• Text is rendered with correct fonts and styles
• Encoding is detected and text is decoded correctly
• cargo run -p we-browser (no URL) opens about:blank
• Failed loads show appropriate error messages
• No external dependencies, no unsafe (except in allowed crates)

Dependencies#

Depends on: All other Phase 8 issues (this is the integration issue)