Comment by piker
5 days ago
Do you not worry that instead it will lead to feature bloat and fragmentation? If you’re going to strike at Google, you need laser focus.
5 days ago
Do you not worry that instead it will lead to feature bloat and fragmentation? If you’re going to strike at Google, you need laser focus.
Not really. Everything has a spec, so it's pretty clear what's in scope and what isn't. Also, we don't have time for bloat with our team size. We have to be laser focussed on what actually makes a difference to real websites. It's Chrome that has bloat!
Also the specs don't change much (there are additions, but almost always backwards-compatible), so once written the code shouldn't need too much maintenance.
I see it as writing a piece of foundational infrastructure. You can write your own HTTP library. But you don't need to: there are high-quality libraries readily available (e.g. curl or hyper). Similarly for HTML parsers or 2D graphics rendering. Nobody's done that for web layout yet (except arguably React Native's Yoga [0], but that's much less ambitious in terms of how much of the spec it attempts to support), so everybody has to write their own. But it's possible so we're doing it.
[0]: github.com/facebook/yoga/
Shadow DOM and CSS Grid don't strike me as bloat or fragmentation in any way? CSS Grid in particular is table stakes that would be part of any laser focus.