It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. The very first web dev built his own browser in a few megabytes of C and created his own markup language (based on SGML). Everything we use today is based on that work. So I think it's a relevant marker for when the line between advanced web development and "regular" coding gets blurry.
>It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless.
I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins. I might not have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question worth asking instead of leaving such definitions up to a God of the Gaps-like argument.
>It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser.
99.9% of front end web developers and back-end as well won't even know how to begin to do this in C or C++. Nowadays to even build a trivial renderer in C or C++ using vulkan is not something someone can pull up a tutorial for and learn. Not like React or Vue or even some backend framework.
>I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins
You accomplish nothing with this other then to put one set of developers in a stupid bucket and another set in a smart bucket. These buckets are real but specifying and talking about the bucket only pisses people off. Additionally the line is very complicated and has several dimensions and in many areas the line is not a line, but a gradient.
You'd only be aware of of this dichotomy if you worked outside of web development (and not in datascience).
>It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless.
I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins. I might not have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question worth asking instead of leaving such definitions up to a God of the Gaps-like argument.