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Comment by almostarockstar | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting game we are playing.

Take websites as an example. We have to build websites using CSS and HTML and JS because that is what works in browsers. But browsers have to build DOMs, layout engines and JS engines this way because that's the way we write code. It's nobody's fault. It's evolution with a bad fitness function.

We need a new start. A new paradigm.

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No, there were some deliberate design decisions. E.g., there was an attempt at a new start: XHTML 2. This got boycotted by browser vendors out of a mix of politics and business priorities.

Instead they went with HTML 5, which generally sees scripting as the core to make non-trivial web applications and also explicitly encourages JS libraries and frameworks.

So I don't think it's surprising that today, pages are piles of scripts on top of scripts.

In a sense AMP is the answer, produce less by having explicit limits while not throwing all tooling out. While AMP is somewhat more technically complex it's much simpler when you consider what it disallows.

However technology/solution is only tool, real problem is in the domain of users, how to make useful systems, how to make users care, technology is irrelevant for most of us.

So in a sense, web browsers are a bit to promiscuous. Website builders would have more incentive to properly engineer their websites if browsers were pickier. One issue with that is that it is the websites visitors who are most likely to see the errors and not the designer of the site.

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