Well, WebKit is nice and all. At some point, it was not WebKit, but Gecko that was the shit. Then early WebKit authors made something that was easier to embed a

Well, WebKit is nice and all. At some point, it was not WebKit, but Gecko that was the shit. Then early WebKit authors made something that was easier to embed and had a license that was friendlier to corporate entities. Apple and Google flocked to it, and improved it even more. They could do this because they had a standard to work from. They didn't have to source-reverse-engineer Gecko, because they could work from that standard, that described how things worked. They didn't have to fork Gecko (nor would they have wanted to because of the licensing), because they didn't need to do things exactly the same way even where it made no sense. This standard came to be because earlier browser vendors (including Microsoft/IE and Mozilla/Gecko) understood that things would be a mess if they didn't cooperate. They'd been there, and done that. If you're now proposing to drop the actual standardization process and define the Internet as "whatever WebKit renders", be aware that you're just killing what made WebKit possible in the first place. You could fork WebKit, but you'd still have to emulate it close enough to be bug-for-bug compatible. That's not a way to get a real improvement or independent implementation. And it wasn't how WebKit came to be, either. For the companies that are heavily invested in WebKit (Apple, Google), it's a wet dream: it ensures they can never be eclipsed by something even better. Imagine if we had done that for Gecko (it's open source too, after all!): Mozilla could have sat on their asses and wouldn't even really have to have cared about improving it. Luckily people competed with rendering engines, so both WebKit and Gecko keep improving rapidly. And so do IE and Opera. I can make similar analogies for things like C++, GCC and LLVM. Even if the implementations are open source, having a standard that allows independent ones is tremendously important to prevent stagnation. I'm not ready to allow C++ to be redefined as "whatever GCC compiles" any more than I am ready to allow the Internet to be redefined as "whatever WebKit renders". Even though yes, this does mean more work keeping things compatible for me as a C++ programmer.