3 ms·

Drew DeVault has a good blog article about this problem. Choice quote: > I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been publishe

Drew DeVault has a good blog article about this problem. Choice quote: > I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is? > The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

captn3m0 6y ago
Wow. Who would like a w1c specification set, with everything trimmed down like how k3s.
gsnedders 6y ago
This seems exceptionally misleading. Playing with the filters on https://www.w3.org/TR/ https://www.w3.org/TR/, we find out filtering to latest documents (to exclude cases where there are multiple versions of a single document) brings us down to 953, excluding non-normative notes brings us down to 573, we can likely exclude all semweb-related specs to bring us down to 480 specs. And that's still including 199 working drafts, not all of which have any implementation (and some are unlikely to ever have any at this point, essentially long-abandoned). The web platform arguably has problems with scale, but it's nowhere near that extreme.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Also if you were starting a browser development nowadays you could probably safely strip out most of the XML specs as not that relevant. Keep XML, XML Namespaces, drop XSL-T (despite how much I love it, I would not implement if I were building a browser), XSL-FO (never had browser implementation tht I'm aware of), XML Schema and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Those are some wordy specs we would be dropping.

captn3m0 6y ago

Wow. Who would like a w1c specification set, with everything trimmed down like how k3s.

gsnedders 6y ago

This seems exceptionally misleading. Playing with the filters on https://www.w3.org/TR/ https://www.w3.org/TR/, we find out filtering to latest documents (to exclude cases where there are multiple versions of a single document) brings us down to 953, excluding non-normative notes brings us down to 573, we can likely exclude all semweb-related specs to bring us down to 480 specs. And that's still including 199 working drafts, not all of which have any implementation (and some are unlikely to ever have any at this point, essentially long-abandoned). The web platform arguably has problems with scale, but it's nowhere near that extreme.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Also if you were starting a browser development nowadays you could probably safely strip out most of the XML specs as not that relevant. Keep XML, XML Namespaces, drop XSL-T (despite how much I love it, I would not implement if I were building a browser), XSL-FO (never had browser implementation tht I'm aware of), XML Schema and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Those are some wordy specs we would be dropping.