A gecko is a small to large Japanese lizard. However, in the Mozilla context Gecko refers to the browser layout engine.
What exactly is a layout engine?
In essence a layout engine is responsible for the following:
- Formatting content such as images, text, HTML, and CSS and displaying them on the screen. In other words, it is responsible for defining the placement rules for documents by parsing
them and formatting it accordingly in order to render it on the browser screen. It's functionality is so rich that it is even being used to layout the "Chrome" (i.e. menu bars, scroll bars etc.)
Gecko is:
- open source free software (It was initially created by Netscape Corporation but now its development is stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation.)
- cross-platform (Windows, BSD, Linux and Mac OS X)
- Written in C++
- Gecko is used in almost all Mozilla based software.
- The 2nd most popular layout engine after Trident (IE's layout engine).
Gecko supports the following open internet standards:
- Hyptertext Markup Language (HTML) v4.0
- JavaScript 1.6
- eXtensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 & 2
- eXtensible Hyptertext Markup Language (XHTML) v 1.1
- Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
References