I’ve been out of the browser rendering engine game for a long time.
But even back in the day, the various ways that a DOM element’s physical layout could escape its parent’s bounding box, the multiple stages of coordinate evaluation, the zillion edge cases: it’s hard.
And that’s assuming that all inputs are perfectly formed. By the time you’ve cranked in enough Poe’s Law to be more than a tech demo, and enough performance to interest anyone?
It’s one of the nastiest practical problems you’ll encounter in a long career and the cross product of the kooky standard and the bugs you have to honor on the real web, a back compat story worse than Win32 mean that there’s no One Elegant Answer.
It’s a fucking mess and my hat is tipped to the hard-ass veterans who can even make a credible attempt.
I’d rather be on the hook for a modern RDBMS than a modern browser.
> I’d rather be on the hook for a modern RDBMS than a modern browser.
I've worked on both a RDBMS and a browser, and yes, I'm inclined to agree. In particular, it is largely acceptable for an RDBMS to pick a niche where you perform well, and do worse in others—and you're (silently) allowed to support only a given subset and have your own incompatibilities. Nobody would ever use a browser that performs well on NYT but could hardly run YouTube (or the other way around).
Interestingly, there are very small teams who have written usable instances of both.
I haven't been part of a small team building either, but the obvious small team doing RDBMSes is SQLite. Three people building the world's most popular software, and possibly the world's most robust database. They found a niche and implemented it perfectly.
For browsers, the most prominent example is probably LibWeb/Ladybird, part of SerenityOS (but with a Qt port, allowing it to run on other operating systems). I've never tried it myself, but supposedly it's complete enough to run large web applications fairly acceptably, which is amazing for something developed largely by basically two people AIUI.
I've been watching the SerenityOS videos and especially the Ladybird videos show a decent chunk of spec. One man (okay, one man with a history in WebKit development) and a bunch of volunteers gave built up a browser that could almost be competitive if it existed back in the day. Of course the people working on the project are incredibly talented, but I'd argue that if one full time employee developing both an operating system and a browser can get this much done with a community, the problem isn't as hard as many people deem it to be.
There's a lot that can go wrong, but the spec describes much more than I remember reading back in the day. Layout algorithms and such are all spelled out. There's no arcane knowledge in finding out what the right size of an <img> is, there are rules that will tell you exactly what you want to know if you follow the spec.
Not everything has been documented as well as it should be, but the vagueness and complexity of the web stack devs often like to lament about really isn't that difficult. It's a lot of reading, and boring reading at that, but the problems all seem relatively straightforward to me.
Even quirks mode has been largely documented. A spec for things that don't follow the spec!
I know things were very hard back when Internet Explorer was still a major browser because there were no rules. These days, you can either find your answer in the spec, or the publicly available source code for your competition.
With the amount of features being crammed into database systems these days, I'm not sure what I would prefer to maintain. A modern RDBMS sure seems less complex than a browser, particularly because there's no user facing UI, but the problems with an RDBMS are a lot more about (inventing) complex algorithms than many of the modern browser challenges.
But even back in the day, the various ways that a DOM element’s physical layout could escape its parent’s bounding box, the multiple stages of coordinate evaluation, the zillion edge cases: it’s hard.
And that’s assuming that all inputs are perfectly formed. By the time you’ve cranked in enough Poe’s Law to be more than a tech demo, and enough performance to interest anyone?
It’s one of the nastiest practical problems you’ll encounter in a long career and the cross product of the kooky standard and the bugs you have to honor on the real web, a back compat story worse than Win32 mean that there’s no One Elegant Answer.
It’s a fucking mess and my hat is tipped to the hard-ass veterans who can even make a credible attempt.
I’d rather be on the hook for a modern RDBMS than a modern browser.