I personally feel that Hixie's Laws of the Web (I'm trademarking that since I just thought of it) #3 & #4 are mishandled but as a result of the experiences of the early web.
I remember the early "mobile" web (Palm Treo 650 & BB World Edition in 2004-2009). They weren't as bad as many people made them out to be. Especially if sites focused on content over media. I never did any WAP/WML browsing [0][1] but I guess that was good for Asia & Europe for a little while (?). My answer to #3 is to not worry about it. Vendors & developers naturally respond and improve the experience (usually by removing stuff). MIME/Content types are then important and fallback rendering should be something useable. Must use "IE Edge v. 50+" is a cop out especially if no fallback mode is provided. I'll go somewhere else to get that content, thank you! I remember the early web (95-97) having dozens of plugins available to do different things. And they were shitty (slow, broken, etc). And super insecure (and the matter was compounded by the insecurity of Windows). They required too much of the browser's context and the plugin's context to be shared. Eventually the web down-selected to a few (Java & Flash). My answer to #4 is to have something like sandboxed plugins which act more file extension handlers. I really hate that my browser decides to render a PDF for me instead of downloading it. Browsers have become more complex than OSes and that's not good. Let a native app handle it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:49 PM, Martin Kühne <mysat...@gmail.com> wrote: > So, what about the impact of #3 and #4 on the code size of modern browsers. > That means it should be easier to understand (and implement) than DOM. > Or is there an even harder problem? > > cheers! > mar77i >