> Why not go all the way and move the rendering engine out of the privileged base of the system? Why is all this HTML and Javascript garbage in "kernel land" anyway?

There's a little-known emotional factor in software development at work here, apparently not clearly understood, indeed it might as well be a secret. And that is that kernel development is high-status, and user-space development is low-status. Many software developers want desperately to add to their resumes the fact that they contributed code to the Linux kernel. This is why so much user-space code has made its way into the kernel.

Someone powerful should go through all the kernel-space code and order the deportation to user-space of all the stuff that doesn't belong, that has slipped across the border over the years like phony political refugees. This probably won't happen, but it's uncontroversial that much of the kernel code has no right to be there, and much of it is written so badly that it's dangerous for it to be in kernel space.