It's not just the Web, it's how the internet was created "Rough consensus and running code". People have always crafted their own specs and initial implementati

It's not just the Web, it's how the internet was created "Rough consensus and running code". People have always crafted their own specs and initial implementations first, and then sought out peer review. It's how the IETF worked with RFCs. It's usually never been the case that successful standards have been developed whole-cloth by committee and are almost always the result of a single inventors doing 80% of the work, making lots of proposals and shipping experiments to early adopters, and the standards groups refining it before shipping.