Major browser dev teams rewriting components over year-long periods of carefully planned integration points (with Mozilla even introducing a new programming lan

Major browser dev teams rewriting components over year-long periods of carefully planned integration points (with Mozilla even introducing a new programming language along the way) is hardly telling anything about the viability of developing a browser from scratch. Given the powers-that-be in so-called "web standards", by the time you've got anything to show odds are it'll be obsolete. What would be helpful is if the whole web stack could be organized into profiles (eg. things working without JavaScript, without CSS "4" features, etc.), but WHATWG dismissed the idea of HTML/CSS versions or device profiles proposed by MS (hell they even can't be bothered to version their "living standard" specs). And W3C could start to give formal semantics for CSS (which is kindof "implementing" and verifying the spec) rather than prose about dozens of layout models in an untyped ad-hoc syntax. That is the role of standard bodies, not to lead us into a way-of-no-return for the benefit of very, very few people.