This makes a ton of sense to me with the huge corpus of web standards that exist. In theory we should be able to generate a browser from those specs, it just took a massive amount of effort before. Maybe if things like this get some traction, some of the human time spent implementing the spec could be spent on creating more/better specs, allowing for even better generation too.
Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.
> In theory we should be able to generate a browser from those specs, it just took a massive amount of effort before.
No, not really. The absolute vast majority of those specs are human technical and technical-adjacent language, not machine-readable specs.
On top of that many web specs often invent new terminology because a lot of things are specced years or decades after something popular has taken over the term in userland.
Maybe over time the specs will become more machine readable (bounded and concrete) if we take these paths. Although in some sense everything is machine readable these days, just not deterministically so (less helpful for specs, but not nothing either).
Your second point makes a lot of sense to me too. I’m not sure how this could handle that facet of human nature, except possibly to indirectly contribute to speeding up the cycle of spec creation.
Alacart · · focus · HN ↗
Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.
troupo · · focus · HN ↗
No, not really. The absolute vast majority of those specs are human technical and technical-adjacent language, not machine-readable specs.
On top of that many web specs often invent new terminology because a lot of things are specced years or decades after something popular has taken over the term in userland.
Alacart · · focus · HN ↗
Your second point makes a lot of sense to me too. I’m not sure how this could handle that facet of human nature, except possibly to indirectly contribute to speeding up the cycle of spec creation.