"Sure, this is a case where change could have only happened if everybody else joined in at the same time." If the US wasn't taken over by the free market capit

"Sure, this is a case where change could have only happened if everybody else joined in at the same time." If the US wasn't taken over by the free market capitalists for the last 30 years, this would be a solved problems. You can't use a non-conforming browsers to do online shopping. Done. "just ask any programmer using a typed language whether they trust code just because it compiles without errors" This is misconstruing the benefit. This prevents a wide class of errors, and a good type system _assists_ in providing generally good designs. Other than the Haskell people not many claim it magically produces correct code. "not having certain checks at the infrastructure level doesn't prevent developers from writing correct and maintainable code if they chose to and understand how." Neglecting such checks is a fairly good indicator of a bad programmer, though. It's like someone might manage a landing while muting the tower, disabling instruments and putting on a blind fold, but shouldn't expect to keep their job afterwards. "The reason the web was so full of shitty code for most of its existence is that "real developers" didn't take it seriously and refused to learn the technologies." And frankly, it was a pretty sensible choice, it was pretty clear that the politics of the time were stacked up against them. The same sense that tells people to use the safety mechanisms tells them to not fight losing fights. "And finally, the reason WHATWG's HTML revision was so well-received was primarily that it also defined appropriate error handling for real-world situations." No, WHATWG was well received because of a better, more approachable documentation style, significantly better marketing, and good short-term results to reinforce that marketing. W3Cs complete paralysis didn't help.