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.
Watch this video of Andreas doing exactly this, albeit for a simpler web app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4SxKWwFhA0
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.
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.
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.
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’.
Not an example to follow, but pretty common IME.
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].
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.
toxic negativity.
If Twitter rendered fine, chances are some other site render fine today. The same it was with Wine.
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.
They don't care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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