Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust
by jefftk on Saturday August 15, 2020 @07:46PM
(#24173455)
> No need for new standards, you just implement recent standards properly and don't pay attention to the real world
Unfortunately for your purposes, The specifications are defined in a layered way, and you can't just implement the recent ones without everything underneath. And then HTML5 codifies a lot of "real world messiness": early browsers did all sorts of strange things, and then layered on even more strange things to try and be compatible with each other. HTML5 threw away the approach of specifying the way things would ideally work, and instead focused on specifying the way things actually do work. Which means to implement HTML5 fully you really need to do quite a lot of work.
No need for new standards, you just implement recent standards properly and don't pay attention to the real world (as in "what people thought was HTML at which time").
It might be more worthwhile to clean up some existing rendering engine, factoring out kludges (for the aforementioned "real world") into code that can be disabled at compile time so we are left with a FOSS "pure specs" implementation of current specs. I personally would be interested in seeing what breaks, betting on "not much".