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> A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. Modern browsers support a lot of most definitely not modern features. I believe it would b

> A usable general browser is near impossible to build from scratch. Modern browsers support a lot of most definitely not modern features. I believe it would be feasible to create an entirely new browser from scratch if those older features were ignored. Take for instance Mozilla's experimental Servo rendering engine and Deno for ECMAScript - these were created in mere years with (relatively) small teams. I would be quite comfortable using a web browser that supported, say, CSS Flexbox and Grid quite well but didn't implement every historical way of centering text on a page.

userbinator 3y ago
Better to ignore the new features since that's where all the complexity and churn is, and most sites are fine as plain HTML <5 anyway.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  The thing is, HTML5 introduced the 'semantic' elements (<nav>, <video> etc.) which let the browser know what it is that it's supposed to be displaying. That means that an HTML5 page without any CSS or JavaScript could be understood by the browser and displayed exactly like a native application would be on the platform: the same visual style, the same accessibility features, the same behaviour for keyboard shortcuts or touch gestures. With HTML <5 (and excluding XHTML from the discussion) the browser has no clue what all those <div> and <table> elements are supposed to be, so CSS and JS are necessary to reproduce basic things like screenreader flow for all but the most basic page layouts. Ironically, the opportunity for users' browser to apply stylesheets on generic, semantically meaningful sites was one of the original concepts behind CSS (hence 'cascading' in the acronym - the browser takes precedence), which is now usually employed to overwrite the browsers' defaults!
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Servo is vaporware and Deno is a package manager/framework wrapped around Google Chrome's V8
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Good point about Deno, but it's unfair to call Servo that. It genuinely is a functioning layout engine, although of course Mozilla have mostly incorporated its innovations into Gecko and abandoned it as a distinct project.
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    I didn’t realize Servo was only research

userbinator 3y ago

Better to ignore the new features since that's where all the complexity and churn is, and most sites are fine as plain HTML <5 anyway.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
The thing is, HTML5 introduced the 'semantic' elements (<nav>, <video> etc.) which let the browser know what it is that it's supposed to be displaying. That means that an HTML5 page without any CSS or JavaScript could be understood by the browser and displayed exactly like a native application would be on the platform: the same visual style, the same accessibility features, the same behaviour for keyboard shortcuts or touch gestures. With HTML <5 (and excluding XHTML from the discussion) the browser has no clue what all those <div> and <table> elements are supposed to be, so CSS and JS are necessary to reproduce basic things like screenreader flow for all but the most basic page layouts. Ironically, the opportunity for users' browser to apply stylesheets on generic, semantically meaningful sites was one of the original concepts behind CSS (hence 'cascading' in the acronym - the browser takes precedence), which is now usually employed to overwrite the browsers' defaults!

pipeline_peak 3y ago

Servo is vaporware and Deno is a package manager/framework wrapped around Google Chrome's V8

seabass-labrax 3y ago
Good point about Deno, but it's unfair to call Servo that. It genuinely is a functioning layout engine, although of course Mozilla have mostly incorporated its innovations into Gecko and abandoned it as a distinct project.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  I didn’t realize Servo was only research