Given that someone that needs to develop a browser probably needs to hunt and peck through all that trash to find the relevant bits of information, is it not actually more damning that such a vast quantity of irrelevant cruft exists?
Is this not the corporate equivalent of creating a walled garden (perhaps not the right phrase here, gastric moat sounds more apt), by exhausting the resources of all that should choose to attempt to scale this mountain of junk?
That being said, I can't make any suggestions as to how you could shortcut through that other than just having decades of experience in the field.
Isn't that true for any system that's been around for a few decades? Try implementing XMPP; which XEPs do you pick? It's a long list.[1] Try implementing email: there's probably more RFCs to exclude than include at this point, and what do you need and what is optional?
This is in fact one of the big issues with xmpp. Everything is sorta-kinda compatible but not really. And email is so getting so complicated that many people are scared of running their own server let alone programming one.
One thing the web specs do incredibly well is cross-linking. I've found it quite easy to start with a high-level spec (e.g. flexbox) and drill down into the bits I need because anywhere another spec is referenced it's linked to directly.
Is this not the corporate equivalent of creating a walled garden (perhaps not the right phrase here, gastric moat sounds more apt), by exhausting the resources of all that should choose to attempt to scale this mountain of junk?
That being said, I can't make any suggestions as to how you could shortcut through that other than just having decades of experience in the field.