Rendering Layer

The rendering layer is where the browser assembles the final pixels a user sees. It is a compositing surface, not a storage format: the DOM is structured data, the source asset is raw imagery, and the rendering layer is where structure and imagery meet the viewport. CSS filters operate at this layer, applying their transformations to the rasterized output before it reaches the screen. This architecture has specific consequences for the wiki's illustration system. A single stipple PNG stored once on disk can appear rendered in a dozen different ways across the site — inverted for dark mode, sepia-tinted for parchment mode, desaturated for print stylesheet — without any modification to the source file. The layer does the work.