I agree that those are drawbacks, but they're drawbacks of the standards process used, not the technology itself. They could have standardized around the subset

I agree that those are drawbacks, but they're drawbacks of the standards process used, not the technology itself. They could have standardized around the subset of SQL supported and alleviated those concerns. IndexDB seems to be deliberately dumbed down in capability just to make it easier to describe in a standards document. If we were all suffering from interoperability problems with WebSql there might be an argument for something simpler. But that's not the case -- wherever it's implemented, WebSql works the same. It turns out a good open source implementation makes a really good standard. It leaves no room for ambiguity. And anybody who really wants to do their own implementation has free access to everything they need to know to be compatible. The fact that no one has done so just shows that sqlite3 is already good enough, and it's silly not to just use it.