The elephant in the room is that the majority of the standards we end up with are the same thing done three or more different ways in a great rush by a bunch of

The elephant in the room is that the majority of the standards we end up with are the same thing done three or more different ways in a great rush by a bunch of industry players, with the most popular one being sufficient for a demo app, and the rest being unknown and NIH'd out of parlance. What we've managed to seriously agree on: * 8-bit bytes * IEEE 754 * Unicode Still up for grabs to a motivated dissenter: * Endianness * Line endings * 3D coordinate systems * Structured data encoding * Networking protocols * Calendars * Everything else The browser does work and do some useful things. At the same time, it is mostly a defacto-standard in the post-Chromium era. Specifications like Web Audio did not appear through a lengthy process like, e.g., what created MIDI 2.0. A team at Google appointed themselves a rubber stamp for the thing they wanted to do. But if you actually want to implement it, you look at what Chromium did. These days I go with the assumption that most of our interfaces are not seriously standardized, and starting over is correct once you have an application that really needs control.