We absolutely plan to (and are!) working on new standards that enable greater efficiency and developer productivity. I don't like the fact that floats are used for layout any more than anyone does, not the least because it makes it hard to parallelize. But at the end of the day we're building a browser, not a from-scratch app platform.
If your browser won't browse the Web, consumers simply won't use it.
What's the pain point here, beyond just wanting to reinvent a round-enough wheel?
Anyone who has attempted to implement trivial things, like thematic scrollbars or cross-browser capable code, or dealt with dom thrashing via JavaScript, knows the amount of effort going in (or knowledge required) to do trivial things is ridiculous; considering how long we've been travelling down this road. Why are we still using a wagon? And why do we want to build more of them running in parallel?
That's true, but that's maybe for the better?
In the sense that it leaves a place for desktop and native apps to thrive too.
I would worry if the browsers was a great execution environment, that could even run Photoshop or Valve or Pro Tools, and every company went that route.
It would mean total loss of data freedom (they would push you to have them in the "cloud"), and a rent-model for software purchases, with software being able to completely change under your feet (like Gmail did for example).
First things first, I found out the other day that someone actually built the major part of my vision: Constraints Oriented stylesheets (using cassowary).
This is how iOS now handles layout. It makes easy things easy, and hard things achievable. Exactly what you'd want.
Beyond this, I think that html has too many tags. To put another way, the browser should not generally permit <script> and <style> to exist in the same context that <em> can exist. onblah= attributes were a terrible mistake that we'll never be able to undo. It would be cool if there was something like a <content> tag which, within it, only permits content oriented mark up, while disabling scripting and styling tags. Likewise, forms, scripting, meta tags and linkages should be in isolated contexts.
And finally, what idiot decided that & ampersands should have a prominent position in many URLS and then use & for entity encoding in html, a completely different purpose. URLS now have to be http://entity&encoded
uhg. so stupid. what would be wrong with <amp> or <amp/> instead? or since we've freed up & for normal expected use, <gt> <lt> and <quot>
ah well.
example.com/?a=1&b=2
vs.
example.com/?a=1;b=2
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481664/semicolon-as-url...
Somewhere along the line, for some reason, everyone settled on & and the web ossified around the assumption that was the only character that ever gets used.
the paper describing the algorithm is here:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.washington....
Create an entirely different model. One that acts as a hybrid between a full blown inefficient co-ordinate system and, plausibly, a more efficient box model.
We could start by modelling 'movement' which equates to objects having 1. A reference point, 2. A magnitude and 3. A direction.
It would be beneficial to do this in such a way that one could apply functions to said model achieving a reactive design that gives you a sense of a full blown co-ordinate system while achieving simpler mechanisms for ease in development and efficiency.
I know that's pretty high level stuff, but in my mind I can see a fairly clear path to achieve a significant improvement.
The real competition for the web are the walled gardens of iOS and Android App development.
I have no pipe dreams. Displacing the aforementioned technologies with something better is inevitable. I just gave an example of how easy better ideas are to be found.
The benefits are also clear though, basically not being limited to current standards.
And Apple would shove some Obj-C renderer down your device, only this would support only iOS, MacOS and Windows, not Android and certainly not Linux.
FOSS-Shops would transmit only a repackaged build system which then would start downloading source packages and start compiling them in your browser. 3min later and you could actually start using the application.
I really fail to see the advantage here.
I was just hoping there was some interesting project already underway I could read about.