Compared to that, getting an RFC through the IETF strikes me as fairly simple. If I had to get the whole new operating system, etc, through the IETF, I might a

Compared to that, getting an RFC through the IETF strikes me as fairly simple. If I had to get the whole new operating system, etc, through the IETF, I might agree with you! You know, all your questions have the same answer. Of course no standard can control the behavior of a remote server. But when you have an environment in which mutability is neither expected nor produced, any violation of immutability is easily recognized as a bug - and (in a highly specified system like Urbit) a very unlikely bug. Whereas whatever conventions you add to the W3 environment that say "this resource is immutable," pretty much everything in that environment is "overloaded with a number of purposes, which don't always mesh very well" - and if the receiving end of a protocol actually treats your conventions as if they were ironclad rules, it's violating Postel's Law. There's just too much "give" in the whole system, and that's a mistake that's much easier to not make in a new system, than to fix in the old one.