The Web Is Dead, Long Live the Web

humane.computer

4 pointsfeichtinger3 comments

I'm curious why can't the html standard be defined in form of source code (of a parser and a render), rather than human language.

the trouble developers have to support many browsers is because of the implementation variations.

a recent issue I had on Edge is that if the border color is #FFFFFFFF, it is rendered as black, but on other browsers, this is white.

What if the standard itself is defined as a common source code, and not owned by any company?

the standard implementation could be a dumb one without any hardware acceleration. It only needs to define the correct behavior. Any customized implementation has to conform to it.

An interesting idea! I think that was one of the original goals of the VPRI project (http://vpri.org) — very high-level executable specs that encoded the meaning rather than worried about performance. IIRC, their 2D graphics library was about 45 LOC (https://raw.github.com/wiki/damelang/nile/socal.pdf)

The question still remains: what should the standard look like? And I think right now there’a not enough agreement on what the Web should be to make standardisation effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com