alt Hacker NewsYou are the one misunderstanding my point.
There ARE ONLY THREE implementations of the client platform.
I would like for there to be a hundred, and there would be if the platform was simpler, but its not, so there won't.
You are the one misunderstanding my point.
There ARE ONLY THREE implementations of the client platform.
I would like for there to be a hundred, and there would be if the platform was simpler, but its not, so there won't.
I think you have the causality incorrect. There aren't fewer implementations because the standard is complicated; the standard is the product of the browser wars, when well-resourced browser implementors differentiated themselves by adding behavior to anemic/underspecified standards. Browser vendors did, to their credit, co-operatively add a lot of common/similar behavior and then work to standardize it--that's healthy standards growth. But a lot of the size of the standard is because they all wanted to add different capabilities to entice users.
A standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge. See also: AMQP, C++.