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> and I suspect it’s bigger than everything else put together, apart from ECMAScript The thing is, it's not just the HTML standard. It's also all the standards
by illiarian 4y ago
> and I suspect it’s bigger than everything else put together, apart from ECMAScript
The thing is, it's not just the HTML standard. It's also all the standards it references. And all the standards they reference, and all the standards those standards reference, ad infinitum.
For example, HTML 5 references SVG 2 which references CSS 2 which references Unicode and XML 11. Or, to go the same route, HTML 5 references SVG 2 which references CSS 2 which references CC.1:2004-10 (Profile version 4.2.0.0) Image technology colour management which references (normative) ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, IEC 61966-2-1 (1999-10), Multimedia systems and equipment — Colour measurement and management — Part 2-1: Colour management — Default RGB colour space — sRGB and TIFF 6.0 Specification, Adobe Systems Incorporated among other things.
Yes, some of those overlap (as many standards will reference many the same standards), but the number of those standards is definitely non-trivial. Some of them you can probably pull in as system libraries or external libraries. The question is, how many?
Edit: and some of them are definitely not relevant to the web, but how would you know until you read through the spec that references it, and through the referenced spec to find and understand the relevant bits?
- arp242 4y agoEssentially any specification that includes any kind of image support will include this kind of chain of specifications; just as any system that does networking will eventually end up with TCP, any system that does text ends up with Unicode, etc. Even the simplest possible 1995-esque browser will have to deal with that (support for images was added in 1993, and text and networking were always central).
- illiarian 4y ago> Even the simplest possible 1995-esque browser will have to deal with that (support for images was added in 1993, and text and networking were always central). Indeed they did. Here's what author of KHTML said, https://twitter.com/LarsKnoll/status/1421121639845187585 https://twitter.com/LarsKnoll/status/1421121639845187585 --- start quote --- Implementing a browser engine from scratch was a lot of work in 1999/2000, it’s close to impossible today. --- end quote ---
- mananaysiempre 4y agoISO 646 and 61966? I won’t disagree with your annoyance with ISO water torture[1], but ASCII and sRGB are not the examples of needlessly sprawling web of references I would’ve chosen. Even if sRGB is an utter mess[2], it’s a mess you essentially have to use if you’re doing colour on computers. [1] https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt [2] https://photosauce.net/blog/post/what-makes-srgb-a-special-color-space https://photosauce.net/blog/post/what-makes-srgb-a-special-c...
- illiarian 4y agoI just randomly selected some without going too deep into details. But yes, sRGB is also referenced from CSS because, you guessed it, CSS deals with color :)
- philistine 4y agoTo make a web browser from scratch is like making a hamburger from scratch. The problem is not about the first part but what you truly mean by from scratch.