This reminds me of a chapter from an HTML5 e-book that was recently posted: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html If there's a

This reminds me of a chapter from an HTML5 e-book that was recently posted: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html If there's any consistent theme to the history of web standards, it's that all the successful standards start as someone's proprietary extension that eventually becomes a de facto standard before being codified by the standards committee. Standards that start in the committee rarely gain traction.