Comment by dmitriid
3 years ago
"The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications"
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
No idea how Flow does it, but building a browser is nearly impossible.
It's well known that Drew Devault count is meaningless since it includes dupes, drafts, and unrelated specs. Still, the space to cover for a from scratch browser is huge.
Flow didn't start "from scratch" recently, it's an evolution of a primarily SVG+CSS renderer for set top boxes. They also re-use Spidermonkey as their Javascript engine.
> It's well known that Drew Devault count is meaningless since it includes dupes, drafts, and unrelated specs.
It's not meaningless. Because in order to implement a browser, you have to figure out which of them are dupes, deprecated, drafts etc.
And even that won't help you. Because a huge amount of "deprecated" standards are in the browsers. A huge amount of stuff in the browsers is still at the "community draft" stage, and yes, you have to implement that, too.
Microsoft simply gave up, forked Chromium... And they still can't keep up: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
The Edge graph stops before they switched to chromium though...
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> it includes dupes, drafts, and unrelated specs.
Even if it's overblown by, say, three times, that's still over thirty million words.
Note that a large effort has been made to make specs more precise, to be easier to implement in an interoperable way.
That contributes to "word bloat", but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Picking the right metrics is not always that easy!
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