> Eons ago I wondered why the IRC and NNTP protocols weren't being improved. For the same reason SMTP hasn’t meaningfully improved in the last 25 or so years.

> Eons ago I wondered why the IRC and NNTP protocols weren't being improved. For the same reason SMTP hasn’t meaningfully improved in the last 25 or so years. It’s an ossified protocol because of all the competing implementations. Moxie is right about that bit. HTTP and HTML are slightly different because of the huge dollars backing implementers, but there are still significant features not in one or more if the major browsers, and adoption of HTML5 was actually pretty slow. Basically, open standards sound awesome, but they quickly get frozen in time due to compatibility constraints.