This approach works better for Wine where the Windows binaries are a fixed target.
On the web, you may get Twitter's feed rendering acceptably, and then two days later they ship an insignificant redesign that happens to use sixteen CSS features you don't have and everything is totally broken again.
The point isn’t that “getting X to work” is a one-and-done job. Rather, you’re using major websites as indicators for what features to target next, because those are largely one-and-done.
Of course you are correct that supporting Twitter or any service is a moving target, so long as it changes. But that doesn't mean specific bugs can't be captured in a test case.
At one point, he deletes half the HTML file to isolate where in the site the problematic code is. In a way doing a kind of binary search. After a few iterations of this, he comes up with a very small case that exhibits the problem he's trying to solve.
It's clear he knows his way around the codebase and where to make changes, but isolating these test cases is probably as important. And presumably if you fixed enough of these issues (while following the specs), 99% of the modern web should work just fine.
> On the web, you may get Twitter's feed rendering acceptably, and then two days later they ship an insignificant redesign that happens to use sixteen CSS features you don't have and everything is totally broken again.
this is not directed at you, but at this attitude which is very common and which I see all the time: everyone is lightning fast to come up with reasons that something won't work.
why?
why do people say things without understanding that almost any given problem has subproblems, and that those can be solved.
in humans, negativity is always just under the surface, and positivity is often buried deeply, and I do not understand this. I don't think I ever will. people just love to be contrarians.
It's really tiring. It's everywhere on HN, I deal with it everyday at work, and everywhere else I look.
Instead of it being criticism, the commenter could've seen it as a positive. Every time a site changes, you discover functionality you haven't implemented yet. Over time, you've implemented more and more. It's progress. Progress is good. Choosing the negative interpretation is so endemic and arbitrary and simply unnecessary.
If you have infinite time and resources with perfect communication/understanding you can solve a lot of engineering problems. No one has that. This is where the original quoted claim from the article comes from, "building a web browser is impossible". That's encoding a lot of experience and reality of the Brobdingnagian challenge of building a web browser from scratch on 2023's web.
It's not negativity to point out a downside to an approach to a particular problem. It's potentially useful to get feedback on a development approach. Constructive criticism is very important in engineering projects because it encodes assumptions of limitations we all have.
A positive statement like "oh those sub problems are solvable!" doesn't really provide any help. No shit the problems are solvable in a perfect world. Such statements aren't even necessarily constructive because they don't offer any analysis or advice. It smacks of toxic positivity[0].
not all positivity is toxic positivity, you know. I wasn't even positive, I was just anti-negative. being against negativity is not the same as being positive at all.
spouting out a problem you foresee being revealed after another problem is solved is not constructive criticism, it is reactionary and attention-seeking.
my comment is about comments like yours; unlimited time and energy to mention anything that makes what I say sound bad, improbable or difficult, and zero time or energy to even entertain the idea that my point of view is valid, and worth considering.
It's just an effort to enforce social conformity. A specific case of this type of browbeating may not be helpful, but on the whole it's often positive for the group to be mostly uniform. It's also often negative! More a value-neutral standard human tribal grouping behavior than anything.
With regards to the negative interpretation having positive value, yes - working in a company that values ‘not failing in particular cases’ higher than ‘working in general, room for improvement’.
For example in a conservative corporation where a given project requires a ‘go’ from several departments were the success of the project does not give an immediate advantage to those departments, but a failure will require them to explain why they didn’t ‘catch it in review’.
Sure but Wine is a tool where if 90% of the stuff user wants to run in it works, it's still great. Say if you use it for gaming you can play most of the games and only boot into windows every few months once you hit one you can't.
But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.
It depends on the types of bugs and inconsistencies that show up in practice. If a page (or worse, the whole browser) crashes, that's a problem. If a column of ads doesn't scale right and gets bumped down to become its own lonely row below the main content, that's kind of ugly but almost a feature.
> But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.
This is a fact that Microsoft understood and pushed when they tried to get people to build pages for IE instead of working across both Navigator and IE.
I come across a variety of sites that show unusual behaviour every day. And as others pointed out, the page is mostly degraded, not unusable.
There are many grievances when using the web today, some are down to the lack of a set CSS spec. Others due to the complete and utter disregard for browser compatibility. I'm not going to tackle the monopoly of Chrome as a browser. However, there are a number of specific uses of this collection of ever changing specs and implementations that eventually lead to page-breakage in every new browser release.
The web is complex to tackle because everyone seems to think that they've a better idea of what a page is. Some of it is fair, some of it unfair. Nevertheless I would take this approach any day.
I completely agree. The people advocating for this type of development style are in another universe. Web is incredibly fragile.
There's a vast difference between a page being degraded by all browsers in a consistent manner per W3C specs (especially the critical parts of a webpage such as JS execution or malformed HTML) vs the damn thing breaking in such a unique way that the web devs will never be able to fix the page for this new browser while getting it to work the same for others. Worst case would be security is compromised and that is a very long list of things to implement in both the HTTP layer and browser behavior before you even get started trying to render a page.
Web devs shouldn't be fixing pages for individual browsers but instead using features conservatively and degrading gracefully where features are not available. Browser bugs shuld be fixed in the browser.
And for 99% of websites security doesn't matter at all because it's just a one-off visit to read an article or look at some funny pictures without any user account.
Web browsers tend to degrade a webpage rather than fail to load it. Given that every day using Chrome I'll come across a website that is having issues with rendering, it should be acceptable.
No wise old pro who was actually worth listening to I ever met in any field ever says things like "my young Padawan". Saying that makes you look like two kids in a trenchcoat trying to pretend to be an adult.
Which in this case is not inconsistent with this apparent misunderstanding of what moving goalposts means.
To use your own silly words, targeting the features that are the most used is litterally one way to choose challenges wisely.
In general the Windows binaries are not really a fixed target for Wine either - many applications (e.g. multiplayer games) have online components that require you to run the latest version. And even for others, people will demand the latest version work. Fixing things that are actually work first is still a good way to prioritize things - it's not like you stop implementing functionality once one target program works, you just move to another one. And if you run out of interesting programs then you can look at 100% API coverage.
yep, even better in unmaintained consoles, where the popular demand for concrete binaries is pretty much set in stone and you can even aim to complete the entire library of software binaries over time - as they're usually in the hundreds or low thousands rather than millions or billions
however the aim to build a reasonably sized and not ossified-to-previous-spec web browser is very interesting, especially if it's well engineered and made to be portable
On the web, you may get Twitter's feed rendering acceptably, and then two days later they ship an insignificant redesign that happens to use sixteen CSS features you don't have and everything is totally broken again.