As for the engine side, the benefits would be the same like with OpenSSH etc. as mentioned in the GH issue. Unfortunately (or fortunately if he is right) a Servo developer thinks "this separation (if it’s even possible) sounds like a bunch of additional work with no benefit". I'm afraid this nice and shiny new engine will end up being complex and unmaintainable like all the others. Again this is speculation not based on facts, but experience with software development in general.
If I had to name the parts of Servo I'd love to drop, it wouldn't be what you think: it'd probably be inline hypothetical box/containing block calculation, followed by CSS 2.1.E compliant content layerization. Probably margin-collapse too. These areas are where most of the complexity and bugs lie, but they're also the areas that Web developers won't give up. Drop correct rendering of inline hypothetical blocks and you break google.com.
The fact is that simple Web browsers already exist (ELinks, for example). You aren't using them because they don't support enough of the "ugly" features. Browsers have to be complex because the Web is complex. The Web is complex because people rely on the complex features.
> If I had to name the parts of Servo I'd love to drop, it wouldn't be what you think ...
Interesting.
> I think you're under the impression that new Web sites tend to avoid all the "goop".
Well as a web developer myself I do realize I'm adding a lot of workarounds, that's part of my frustration. It seems counterproductive for you guys as engine developers, and us web developers to use such an ever increasing amount of code just to work around stuff we throw at each other.
> Presumably for OpenSSH, if you control the server and it's properly configured you can drop the ugly, old code. Not so on the Web. Old and new Web sites alike rely on all sorts of corner cases.
Maybe for OpenSSH, but I think OpenSSL suffers from the same legacy compatibility issues as a browser. Still LibreSSL took an OpenSSH like approach by separating out all system specific exceptions from the base and put them in a different portability package.
> ... (ELinks, for example). You aren't using them because they don't support enough of the "ugly" features.
I'm not using elinks or other text based browsers not because they miss a lot of features, but because they're not as secure as I did expect from a text based browser[0]. They are still full of all sorts of features[1] that add to it's complexity without having enough value, imho. I think it's a feature to be not full featured.
[0] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=140516601718662&w=2 about gopher support in lynx
[1] Elinks: Full-Featured Text WWW Browser - Lots of protocols (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6) http://elinks.or.cz/about.html
Can't they do that now? What exactly would that proposal bring new?
> Less code needs to be reviewed, tested and maintained.
Now there's four, then would be five different browsers. Why does this reduce anybody's work?
> this is speculation not based on facts, but experience with software development in general.
I'd say that experience you refer to doesn't include the one described in:
In any case, this is a most innovation-unfriendly reference that is all too common.
OP here.
Totally right, because I didn't know how Servo is implemented, I've asked. Sorry for mixing in some emotion and hope about which answer I would get. I respect any developer doing any work and do realize it's all too easy to spread opinion without hacking on some solution.
Maybe as a non-contributor I should not have ventilated my opinion.
It seems to me that the author of the question never looked at any of the details of what and how is actually implemented and asks "just so, in principle." Which can be more distracting that bringing any value to the project.
Even if we stay on that level of "not knowing what we actually and specifically want and don't want" what's the expected use of the engine that effectively doesn't work? The "reference." Would enough web developers then really even consider it worth of the effort? What would the web developers have by producing the code for something that somebody calls the "reference" which is otherwise unusable?