There are different views on HTML5. I, personally, find it amazing that there is a somewhat concise standard at all, provided the convoluted history (including

There are different views on HTML5. I, personally, find it amazing that there is a somewhat concise standard at all, provided the convoluted history (including contradicting standards as in HTML3.x and HTML4.x and XHTML) and various browser idiosyncracies and the requirement to fail gracefully. HTML is not your normal parser spec and IMHO the HTML5 parser was a major step towards a user friendly specification. However, given the very special requirements, it's probably not the best example for any other standard. (The argument regarding the dominance of Google has merit, but these are the realities of modern web politics. Let's see, whether "portal" will be accepted or not, which will be a valid test case.)