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Comment by progfix | Hacker News Reader

Do they use their internet dominance to invent a bunch of complex html elements so google becomes the only one being able to parse html effectively in the future? I hope not.

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They kind of already are, that's why Firefox is forever playing catch-up and Microsoft ditched Edge/Trident.

The last couple of bleeding-edge features I looked at were SVG favicons and position: sticky. Firefox is ahead of Chrome for both of these.

I don't think Google can be wholly blamed for that dominance. It's only natural that they would want to invent their own web rendering engine and with it they can pretty much choose what they do.

What's less natural is that so many other browsers/frameworks chose to be based upon it (like every Electron app in the world, Opera, Silk, Microsoft Edge real soon now™). Apart from Safari or Firefox, there aren't really many alternatives anymore.

It's the natural consequence of people clamoring to turn a simple hypertext engine into a full on application VM. Feature upon feature was piled on, producing a gigantic ludicrously complicated garbage fire the likes of which simply cannot be replicated by mortals, and to ensure this whoever is on top will keep adding to the garbage fire so no one can ever catch up.

Web devs and evangelists of the world, you brought this on yourselves.

IMO it's not so much about blaming or other moralistic category a la "Google is evil" than it is about whether we're going to accept and let happen the Googlification and appification of the web. If we do, than we (as in humanity) must look elsewhere now for our communication needs. Think about how involved the web in everyday life is (in education, personal communication, public services, contracts, law, webmail, ecommerce, etc. etc.). If we accept that this medium is going to slip away and out of control for no good reason, then we need to specify something with a more specific scope for preserving digital documents, contracts, transaction manifests etc. that is also fully able to represent existing (static or dynamic) HTML content.

I'm not just talking the talk here: I've spent significant amout of time (years) in implementing SGML and an SGML grammar for HTML5 [1].

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html

It's exactley what Microsoft tried to do.

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