This effect is very noticeable in the HTML 5 process. <video> is an attack on Adobe; offline storage is Google's attempt to make Gears a browser built-in so GMa

This effect is very noticeable in the HTML 5 process. <video> is an attack on Adobe; offline storage is Google's attempt to make Gears a browser built-in so GMail works better everywhere, etc. But is this really so bad? With luck, you get a compromise that works reasonably well for everyone. If you just leave the standards body to get on with it by themselves, they produce theoretically elegant but totally impractical standards like XHTML 2.0 (or, even earlier, HTML 3.0).