Comment by fabrice_d
3 years ago
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...
Yes, that was my mistake. Doesn't make my words any less true.
> 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!
> Note that a large effort has been made to make specs more precise, to be easier to implement in an interoperable way
This is true for HTML5 which defined full browser behaviour, including things like improperly closed and improperly nested tags.
Many, many other specs? Not so much. Especially the crap that Chrome has been pumping out the past several years.