Why Hitch

Why use Hitch?

The system that we have today, in retrospect, seems like a kind of a bad idea. Having a core standard is definitely a good thing, but innovation in standards bodies is inherently slow and sometimes the things that come out, while beautiful in theory just aren't palatable or sometimes even that useful.

Add to this the fact that browsers have to deal with 100% of the implementation, 100% of the complaints, 100% of the backward support forever, etc. and the fact that browsers have to consider all of their users... HTML and CSS are used for such different things. Consider the living HTML standard single page version which weighs in around 30mb/130k elements and growing every day vs the average web page which is only a tiny fraction of that. Things that are easily plausible for many pages are totally implausible for gigantic pages and the browser manufacturers and working groups need to consider everyone.

Simply put: We feel that the current system puts in place an unfortunate imbalance of incentive/risk/reward and stifles really useful innovation. We feel that it should not be the case that things that are useful to large segments are impossible or made considerably more difficult merely because they are not pragmatic for another segment. It is our hope that this approach will correct some of that imbalance by allowing innovation to be easier and more open - to not be dependent on the browser manufacturer or a standards body and for simple grassroots competition to allow the really useful ideas to gain traction and the really bad ones to die off. When an idea is wildly successful, maybe it's worth considering why and attempting to fill that gap with a native/standard implementation. These ideas work in many other languages and there is little reason to believe it won't here.