Jonathan Blow

You haven't understood what I am saying. "The spec" as it currently exists is a fundamentally bad idea about how to solve this class of problem. The results are obviously terrible. People should observe and learn from this, but somehow don't.

That's not really true though. I mean as I said before, I'd rather use something better and faster. What do you expect the web dev community to do? Write a different browser? How's that gonna work? Nobody wants to live with legacy APIs and slow code.

The job of engineers is to solve problems. If those problems don't get solved, it is because people didn't solve them.

It's not an engineering problem. You can write an amazing new browser tomorrow, but if it doesn't display 90% of the web pages properly, and doesn't handle accessibility and different device types/screens, nobody will keep using it. How do you get people to adopt that?

I mean for the sake of the argument, lets forget about compatibility for a moment, say through some miracle this new browser just works, or at least with most modern pages. You still have to convince people to switch. "It's better" doesn't work, ask Mozilla.

Only if the switch is discontinuous. It is actually not that hard, given WASM etc, to envision a series of transformations that, for example, removes JS from the browser entirely. It only requires will.

Once you remove JS from the browser, now the Web is no longer based on an error-prone slow programming language, so it's a lot more natural for people to choose higher-quality languages (as opposed to hacks on top of JS like TypeScript).

Then once you have real programming languages, why do you have all this DOM stuff and wtf is CSS for anyway, just let peoples' code lay out the text, and get rid of all that junk.