Another feature would be "meta-CSS", which would be only for user stylesheets (and not usable in web pages), and can apply CSS in CSS, for example:
- Apply an animation (or other style) to any CSS styles that specify "text-decoration: blink".
- Specify what colour to use when a CSS rule specifies "background" as the colour name.
- Make all transitions (or animations) twice as fast or twice as slow.
- Prevent certain CSS commands from being used entirely, or change their meaning to a different command.
- Select elements by the CSS rules that the document applies to them (even if those CSS rules are disabled, and even if class names are unpredictable).
- Define exactly how big a "in" or "px" or whatever unit is.
I want to add my personal bugbear, sortable and filterable tables. And Lists of all links on a page. Oh, also expose RSS feeds again. And what about standard form controls that actually could be styled completely with css? Really, the more I think about it, the more come to mind.
While it sounds like it would make browsers more complex, I think it would actually reduce complexity, because the browser would not need even more programming capability and APIs just to enable web developers to create these kind of features themselves in a thousand variations of Javascript that adds bloat to every connection and slows down end user devices.
I agree with these things. I forgot about sortable and filterable tables, but it is correct it should be having. (I would also like the ability to override the browser's default styles without overriding those of the web page, in addition to the ability to override the styles specified in the web page.) If the browser uses SQLite databases for anything (such as bookmarks and cookies), let the user enter SQL commands to sort/filter HTML tables (and export them too, since the commands are entered by the user rather than the web page author, they are privileged).
And, yes, it would reduce complexity in the ways you specified, in addition to improving efficiency and allowing the user more control, and these are good things to have.
Maybe someone will make a web browser program that can do these kind of things.
I didn't mean to suggest we should revert to old days. My vision would be a significant paring down of modern standards, updating relatively quickly even.
As OSs browsers are really bad. You don't have access to the underlying computer, the security model is broken. Just recently Apple announced that Webkit will clear local storage every 7 days (and why? Because the security model is broken). That's not very OS-like.
> We just need a few really good ones.
There is literally only one really good one: Blink. And it's not even that good.
Web browsers have evolved to basically be an OS. You could essentially revert to the old days where it was simple, but why would you?
Users want more features in their web apps, and the standards/web browsers make it possible.
We don't need tons of web browsers, just like we don't need 100s of operating systems. We just need a few really good ones.