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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

That's a philosophical issue, not a functionality one: something can work reasonably well even if you hate the world that results.

(And I sadly just can't buy the philosophical issue anyway, frankly: if anything, I'd argue the biggest flaw with the web is it has a million nit-picky features when it should ONLY offer JavaScript+canvas, as third parties have a hope of reimplementing that correctly, unlike HTML+CSS. To the extent to which there were important behaviors people liked, such as accessibility, those should come from higher-level frameworks instead of being baked into the lowest level of the system.)

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This is a strange position considering I would rank the JavaScript engine as, bar none, the most complex and difficult part of the entire browser stack to develop and keep maintained, and it continues to grow and become more and more complex along with the runtimes implementing it, which were already incredibly complex by design.

> behaviors people liked, such as accessibility

lol

I don't disagree--though I know people, including myself, who have managed to pull off either all of or most of the work required alone--and so in an argument about the JavaScript engine I would argue it should be a VM only, such as WebAssembly.

(As for accessibility, I appreciate you might find my wording funny, but it isn't a laughing matter really.)

> I'd argue the biggest flaw with the web is it has a million nit-picky features when it should ONLY offer JavaScript+canvas

That would break the web, though? One of the biggest _strengths_ of the web is backwards compatibility.. I, for one, am grateful to use modern browsers to consume older content and apps.

This is a "the web made a fatal mistake in the past and should have done X" argument and not a "the web should now do X" argument, though if you want a forward-looking suggestion we need to immediately stop adding NEW behaviors.

accessibility is not a behavior that "people liked". It is enshrined in law in so many countries that they _have_ to be at the lowest level of the system.

I would argue it was enshrined in law because people liked it so much they demanded it, so maybe that's a semantics issue? That said, I do not believe the law insists that it be in the lowest level: the law merely insists that it exist for every site. It is convenient to put it at the lowest level if possible, but now it is just one more thing that literally every browser has to implement from scratch, and so the world that results is that the only company capable of making a good web browser is Google. There are sane reasons why accessibility is not considered part of a CPU (and thereby by most other reasonable runtime engines).

People with reading disabilities, vision issues, etc are rarely the ones being heavily represented in parliaments. Accessibility is truly a case of things being earned through spilled blood, and while there's probably much fewer people dying because they can't read the text on your website, it's a natural extension of the physical world. While the laws do not say that it should be up to the browser, it becomes natural that this moves to the lowest common denominator. Should it not be part of browsers, the moment any dominant browser comes in (say, Chrome) and implements it would lead to thousands of websites relying on this behavior from the browser, leading to "Works only on Chrome" situations, and other browsers most likely rushing behind to also support that feature.

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