I understand the benefit of having simple formatting. I like to do that with log files sometimes, as if you output HTML with the right tags you can use custom CSS to colour and format different types of log messages however you wish. I’d just never considered incorporating an entire HTML browser as a log system within an applicaiton before – it makes sense.

The advantage of a webserver is that the actual data it has to send back is very, very simple – I just have to output the text and stats I want with a little html markup, and can easily style and make it look pretty with static css and image files.

I do have some in-game debug overlays, but sometimes you want it to show in a separate window, or you need a bigger display area. In particular I want to be able to view the render-to-texture results which are often as big as the screen so having them in a separate browser would be very handy (and make capturing them to file trivial too).