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Leaving HTML5 rendering implementation up to each website, while only providing a "dumb" 2d or 3d pipeline (webgl), would make for a terrible non-native browsing experience. No native font rendering, no right-clicking text selection to choose from a dozen OS-provided services, no user-based keyboard shortcuts in text fields like this comment field, and so on.

It would also make it much more difficult to peek at the source code for web pages since there wouldn't be a working DOM inspector in your browser.

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I think the idea would be that there would not be native font rendering or OS-provided services. All that would move up a layer.

Yes, that would give a lot of flexibility. Usability would suffer, though. It would be like the old (1) times of X Windows, where there were zillions (read: > 1) ways to handle a clipboard, multiple conventions for the format of the data on the clipboard, where one application could find your TrueType fonts, while another couldn't, etc.

(1) some people will feel I'm being polite here. Maybe I am, but that is something for another discussion, and I know too little about modern X applications to contribute there.

  No native font rendering

True, but you can render some pretty good looking fonts[0].

   no right-clicking text selection to choose from a dozen OS-provided services, no user-based keyboard shortcuts in text fields like this comment field, and so on.

Could be part of a JS api exposed and used by HTML5.js.

  there wouldn't be a working DOM inspector in your browser

FireBug, and the Chrome Dev Tools are written in HTML. Could be integrated into HTML5.js.

There would be differences for sure, but I think the benefits would outweigh the downsides.

[0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/LoopBlin...

That's assuming everyone is on the official html5.js branch. Seems like it would be pretty easy for a million variants to be developed with all kinds of quick one-off hacks, that would make an off-the-shelf DOM inspector incompatible.

It's like the ultimate "solution" to all those useless anti-view-source javascript efforts.

(Imagine this taken to the extreme - encrypted home-grown markup and stylesheet languages that barely resembles html anymore.)

Also, accessibility would take a major hit.

Also, a huge amount of web sites will never update their html5.js.

Sounds like the anti-web.

> no right-clicking text selection to choose from a dozen OS-provided services

Ah well, this stuff is added into the browser engine already in Firefox OS.

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