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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

A clean break from the past was tried once already: XHTML 2.0. It failed.

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.

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It failed for a number of reasons - timing, lack of compelling new features, IE's lack of support for application/xhtml+xml, Gecko's Yellow Screen of Death, etc. I'm not sure that you can blame any one of them. And it really wasn't a clean break in the sense that whyme is talking about.

I'm pretty sure it failed due to not being backwards compatible. Sometimes you can throw stuff away if it isn't getting much use, but backwards compatibility is too important in the real world.

If your browser won't browse the Web, consumers simply won't use it.

XHTML 2.0 was not a worthy successor. Apologies if my hatred for the current technology is coming through, but hey... At least I'm being honest.

He didn't mention XHTML. He seems to be talking about an entirely new layout language, which is nutty, but not as crazy as XHTML, which was "let's make everything way more complicated for the sake of ideological purity, but not add any new features"

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