It's now nearly impossible to build a web browser from scratch because of runaway explosion of web browser features, and proprietary API extensions.
W3C here is unfortunately a part to the problem.
Standardisation is good, but letting google pour streams halfassedly written RFCs onto other browsermakers is not good.
Non-enforcement of standards is also bad, and it's bad to extend W3C privileges to companies who themselves selectively implement their own proposals, so others' browsers can't match their behaviour.
"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"
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.
W3C here is unfortunately a part to the problem.
Standardisation is good, but letting google pour streams halfassedly written RFCs onto other browsermakers is not good.
Non-enforcement of standards is also bad, and it's bad to extend W3C privileges to companies who themselves selectively implement their own proposals, so others' browsers can't match their behaviour.