Posted by Martin Underwood on 11/23/23 11:42

Next wrote in
1142354536.224320.60080@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com:

> Years ago, it occurred to me that a lot of the trouble
> of writing web browsers is caused by the upside-down
> arrangement of things: Javascript code exists inside
> a document, when really it should be the other way around.
> And yet, although this seems fairly obvious to me,
> having tried myself to write a web browser and given up,
> I don't see a lot of movement by major web browser
> projects in a direction that might TRULY fix the problem.
> I do see a few slow-moving projects: HTML5 and Web Applications.

I think the bigger issue with HTML and browser design is that it only
supplies *hints* and *suggestions* as to the formatting, rather than making
all browsers display a page with identical formatting, as PDF does. It would
be so much easier as the designer of a site if you could be confident that
everyone would see the same view of the page without the line breaks and
table column widths being variable under user control. Let users have a zoom
control (as for Acrobat Reader) it they need larger print but don't let them
change the font size independent of all other objects on the page; let the
site author retain full control over all other aspects of formatting,
typography etc.

This could easily develop into a debate about the philosophy of browers and
the web. I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee and the people that devised HTML would
still have designed it that way that it is in the light of people who are
itching to use it as a tightly-controlled page-format tool.

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