Stupid (and unthankful) question perhaps, but have you considered working on https://ladybird.dev instead? Kling and the small team seem to be making great progress.
Dillo original goal[1] is to provide access to the web to places with very bad internet speed or latency as well as old or resource constrained computers.
[1]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/interview.html
I don't think we will ever implement JS support, as that would increase a lot the minimum requirements to run Dillo and make the attack surface on the browser much bigger.
For low bandwidth or slow computers, also try Carbonyl Terminal (https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal).
With Dillo I'd just had as a 'new' feature, audio and video links opened with xdg-open (or any other plumber) and better Unicode support, which might be reduced due to FLTK, but FLTK itself calls XFT, so I doudt it, as I happened to perfectly open Motif based stuff compiled against XFT with the full coverage of the Unifont font set.
Some kind strangers have created unstable packages on the AUR[0] and NixOS[1]. The former is quite recent, the latter is somewhat older.
> Have you considered support for UTF-8 half-blocks or Sixel for graphics?
In fact, there is experimental support for the sixel & kitty protocols, but for now it's slow, ugly, and only works with PNG.
You can play around with it by putting the following in ~/.config/chawan/config.toml:
[[siteconf]]
host = 'm\.xkcd\.com' # regex for URL matching; .* also works
images = true # try `cha m.xkcd.com'
[0]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chawan-git
[1]: https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&show=chaw...