Comment by zbentley
8 hours ago
I think you have the causality incorrect. There aren't fewer implementations because the standard is complicated; the standard is the product of the browser wars, when well-resourced browser implementors differentiated themselves by adding behavior to anemic/underspecified standards. Browser vendors did, to their credit, co-operatively add a lot of common/similar behavior and then work to standardize it--that's healthy standards growth. But a lot of the size of the standard is because they all wanted to add different capabilities to entice users.
A standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge. See also: AMQP, C++.
The browser wars are long gone, and there is no technical reason why the standards each browser added had to be complex per-use-case builtins instead of composable primitives.
In any case, that is what happened.
And now new projects like Ladybird take a decade to arrive, even with AI, because of the immense amount of stuff in the platform.
> standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge.
None of the Unixes are this bloated.
> The browser wars are long gone, and there is no technical reason why the standards each browser added had to be complex per-use-case builtins instead of composable primitives.
Browser vendors couldn't see the future. Each was doing their best to stand out from the crowd with limited budgets and schedules. Hence JS being as odd as it is.
With hindsight it's clear it could've been better. And now with today's mono-culture there is an opportunity to drop some of the legacy cruft and rethink a modern web. Or even just slimmer Electron-like solutions using an ideal subset as better primitives.
I really wish something like FirefoxOS had gained traction. Because unlike Android, it could make native apps so much more open an approachable. In theory at least.
If you know anything about non-technical people, "how an app looks", is by far the most important thing about it.
The web is uniquely capable (aside from raw OpenGL et. al) at rendering any UX designer's vision.
Almost all alternatives to the web that I've seen make aesthetic impositions, and are therefore non-starters.