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.
There’s quite a few edge cases where browsers allow non-compliant code to render as if it were to specs. Because if a site doesn’t render “correctly” from a user perspective, they blame the browser rather than blaming the web developer.
That does happen, but these days they tend to add that kind of thing to the spec (and the test suite). There was a minor drama several years when WHATWG (representing browser vendors) effectively took over the spec process from the W3C because they were fed up with the W3C taking an idealistic viewpoint, and speccing things that they couldn't actually implement.
That’s good to know. The W3C probably did more to hamper web standards than anyone else (except maybe Microsoft). So I’m not surprised WHATWG took over.
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.
hnlmorg · · focus · HN ↗
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗
hnlmorg · · focus · HN ↗