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There seems to be rather a lot of consensus that the web is a mess but it is what we have. Have there been any serious attempts at producing a solution that is
by Lerc 14y ago
There seems to be rather a lot of consensus that the web is a mess but it is what we have.
Have there been any serious attempts at producing a solution that is better designed that does not simply add new things to the spec. An argument can be made that if a better system existed it would not be able to compete because of inertia, but surely it would be worth at least making the attempt.
I have scribbled notes and designs for years now exploring ideas of what could be done with a clean slate and hindsight that was unavailable to early browser designers. I can't be alone in this. Who else has explored the possibilities of what browsers could be?
- Ygg2 14y agoThis was some time ago on HN http://axrproject.org/ http://axrproject.org/
- Lerc 14y agoThat does indeed look interesting. I shall take a look. I certainly hope there are more projects like this out there. There are many approaches that might be better or worse which might not be apparent until someone attempts it.
- lmm 14y agoXHTML2 (now abandoned) was a serious effort in that direction (while sticking quite close to existing HTML) - consistent syntax and rules for handling it. Honestly I don't think we'd see much change to what browsers can do - like turing-complete languages, everything is possible on the web, just not necessarily as easy as it should be. A lot of parts of the web I view as "assembly languages" - it would be possible to use better alternatives to HTML, CSS, Javascript and perhaps even HTTP, but it's not like we handle any of those directly. So no-one should care except a few library authors - and the libraries have mostly been written now.