"real browser" is doing a lot of work in your comment.
It's not doing nearly as much work as real browsers do!
After all what is a browser other than something that browses? What other characteristics make it "real"?
A real browser is a browser that aspires to be a web browser that can reasonably be used by a (let's say even fairly technical) user to browse the real web. That means handling handling outright adversarial inputs and my point is this is so central to a real browser, it seems it might be hard to retrofit in later.
I gave one example with the null thing, another one would be the section on how the JS API can break the assumptions made by the DOM parser - it similarly sounds like a bug that's really a bug class and a real browser would need a systemic/architecture fix for.
You might as well be describing Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. All are heaping piles of complexity that are tortured into becoming usable somehow. Such is the nature of software. We shoot lightning into rocks and somehow it does useful stuff for us. There's nothing inherently "right" or "wrong" about how we do it. We just do whatever works.
I would say that a "real browser" — which I think is being used here to mean a "production-quality" browser, in contrast to a "toy" browser — would be a robust and efficient browser with a maintainable codebase.
We're well past absurdity on this line of argument.
Given:
A = a goal of just implementing just the latest and most important specs
B = shipping something they want people to use
There is no browser team, Ladybird or otherwise, that is A and not B, or, A and B.
For clarity's sake: Ladybird doesn't claim A.
Let's pretend they do, as I think that'll be hard for people arguing in this thread to accept they don't.
Then, we know they most certainly aren't claiming B. Landing page says it's too unstable to provide builds for. Outside of that, we well-understand it's not "shipping" or intended to be seen as such.
After all what is a browser other than something that browses? What other characteristics make it "real"?
If Ladybird browses, then it must be a browser.