Today's web standards are large & complex enough that it is practically impossible without a full-time team.
I'm not trying to put this little project here down, far from it. I think it's pretty neat. I can imagine even neater (if that's a word) things, though... :-)
I'm not being defensive of this project, I'm being critical of the direction web architecture is going.
Err, at 1991 he just wrote a rudimentary OS from scratch. To make it more unix-like, stable and feature full took hundreds of people, including tens of full time company employees (IBM, RedHat, etc).
We are bequeathing the future a world where building new browsers is approximately an impossibility.
The Web is so much. Now all devices can consume the same files with comparable user experiences. There are reasonable standards. Javascript is a reasonably advanced and simple language (for the time being). But the web has failed much as well.
Hopefully the web will mature someday and someone will clean up the mess we are leaving them.
WebKit is much bigger than that - at least one order of magnitude bigger (that is, 3 millions of LOC).
So yes, this is a tiny wrapper around a huge C++ codebase. The name is kind of misleading. But still a cool project.
The same goes for uzbl, too, of course. Things like the Grail Browser [1] (a Python webbrowser, including the possibility to run client-side python-code - but sadly obsolete and not maintained anymore, as far as I can tell) are so much cooler than just tying webkit to GTK using $LANGUAGE.
I mean, it's not like HTML layout engines or JS-interpreters are somehow impossible to write from scratch.
[1] http://grail.sourceforge.net/