Pinderkent

Douglas Crockford's recent article suggesting the creation of a project to develop a so-called "HTML 4.2" specification makes some very good points. He is quite correct when he points out that when developing standards, "It is easy to pile features on top of features, but that ultimately produces systems that are far too complex, insecure, and unreliable." This is indeed what we have seen with HTML 5, and what we have also seen with the ES4 efforts.

It's quite good to see somebody who is so well-known and respected within the Web development community pointing out such harsh truths. But I suspect what the Web needs is more than just more sensible standards. The entire platform as a whole is badly in need of a "reset".

The Web is truly starting to show its age. After all, it has been around for nearly 20 years now. It's remarkable how well it has handled the growth and change it has experienced. But after nearly two decades, it likely is time for some serious changes.

Web browsers themselves are one area where a "reset" is needed the most. A few days back, Ian McKellar made some pointed observations about the state of the Mozilla platform. Namely, he pointed out how the current codebase is extremely complex, lacks even remotely acceptable documentation, and isn't as appealing to developers as WebKit is.

The need for browsers today to maintain so much backwards compatibility no doubt has a significant cost in terms of browser implementation complexity. Even at a very basic level, there are numerous standards of HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that need to be supported in order to provide just an adequate browsing experience. Add into this mix the need to accept blatantly incorrect HTML markup and JavaScript code, and it's not a recipe for software that's easy to implement and test.

At some point, it will become beneficial to all to stop trying to build upon so many years of cruft, experimentation and legacy. Instead of focusing so much energy on extending what already exists, the core concepts and functionality of what makes up the Web could be consolidated and a more reasonable platform developed. In essence, the entire Web platform needs a "reset" at all levels. Trimmed-down versions of tomorrow's standards only serve to procrastinate with respect to the effort that will eventually be needed to clean this mess up.