I get what you're saying, but what I meant is that it's surely possible to keep the current features while streamlining it into something coherent, much smaller, and easier to implement.
The modern web platform's bloat and what you can achieve with it always reminds me of 1990s demo scene mags on floppy disks and their mag engines. I think most of the problems stem from adding more stuff to HTML rather than taking what we build today building the smallest possible DSL and its engine around it. At some point we have to do a cut like that or we'll have browsers that'll have to support many, many HTML profiles and become monstrosities.
Re:WAVM: standalone WebAssembly VM prototype
by vmorgulis on Monday June 06, 2016 @09:05PM
(#11851708)
I expect a reboot of the web with wasm.
As wasm defines a VM, the browser could become useless.
Given how single page web sites are more or less like Flash in that they don't follow the document model anymore, maybe it's for the best, giving real web pages a chance to revive an effort like XHTML and get us document standards.
Unfortunately, the web became the only app platform that was perceived as being politically neutral, and so there was huge pressure to add features to it. These features all hugely increased the complexity of HTML renderers, and with complexity came bugs.
Could you build a smaller, simpler, safer web? Sure. It's called HTML4.