clean-room-web
A clean-room redesign of the web stack, and a proof that a simpler one was possible.
The web is the most successful cross-platform runtime ever built, and it has grown so complex that the number of organizations able to implement it has fallen from five to three. This project asks what the web might have looked like if it had been designed clean: keeping what made it great, designing against what made it rot.
It is a thought experiment carried far enough to run - an argument backed by a working proof of concept in which a host that is oblivious to layout loads two different layout libraries and swaps one for the other, unchanged.
Papers
- What the Web Could Have Been - the full argument: how the web accreted, the two structural problems underneath it, and the architecture that avoids them.
Elsewhere
- Source and proof of concept: github.com/Binary12Spy/clean-room-web (mirrored on Codeberg)