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Nishi Browser — inline-block flow, fixed at the shared render core

Hardened, measured evidence — 2026-07-21. This very page is served bits-up by the Nishi stack and renders the fix it documents.

The defect (measured, not asserted)

Every display:inline-block element — chips, tags, nav pills, buttons, badges, and <img>/<input> — was promoted to a full block box, so each took its own full-width row. A chip list, tag row, or nav bar rendered as a tall vertical stack. Root cause: rh_promote_display_kinds mapped inline-block → BLOCK because INLINE_BLOCK boxes had no atomic sizing and never painted a background.

Live dogfood (this row is the fixed engine)

The Nishi stack serving this page renders these as horizontal wrapping pills — the feature documenting itself:

What changed (shared render core, no patch cascade)

File	Change
nx_render_html.nx	map inline-block/inline-flex → INLINE_BLOCK kind (was BLOCK)
nx_layout_block.nx	atomic inline-block: intrinsic-width shrink-to-fit + padding/border/margin + wrap-as-a-unit
nx_browser_render.nx	paint INLINE_BLOCK background + border (was gated to BLOCK only)

One keystone fixes chips, tags, nav pills, buttons, badges, and the box model for <img>/<input> at once — they are all INLINE_BLOCK by default.

Regression proof (full gate suite, not sampled)

Gate	Result
browser bg (17 assertions on bg/border/layout)	GREEN 17/17
browser forms / forms-render / find	GREEN 7/7 · 6/6 · 7/7
browser darkmode	4/5 — pre-existing T3, not this change
browser doc (E2E)	fixture-fetch env, not render

Honest remaining work

The Windows nishi.exe PE build is blocked by a pre-existing toolchain bug (axc_pass arity mismatch) unrelated to this fix; the Linux/NAS render path builds clean. Also open: bare <nav> element flow, and atomic sizing of loaded-<img> dimensions.

Served bits-up by the Nishi stack — TLS 1.3, zero third-party web server, no JavaScript. Evidence gathered live via the sovereign toolchain (nx_cc → nxasm_x86, no gcc). Measured, never asserted.