The same is true for standards. There are often so many non-features that make the standard harder to implement yet bring no real advantage. With standards the

The same is true for standards. There are often so many non-features that make the standard harder to implement yet bring no real advantage. With standards the problem is that you have to implement everything to be standard-compliant. And then you have a reluctance to remove the cruft that nobody uses in newer versions of the standard. I'm currently working a bit with SVG paths. There are some features that aren't really used that much in the wild. For instance quadratic bezier curves, arcs, a shorthand syntax for successive horizontal/vertical lines in a subpath. Those things could be debated but they are okay. Then we also have things that are really just unneeded. You can also write numbers in xxEyy or xx.yyEzz way. Scientific notation has limited uses, computer graphics is not one of them. You can use a comma in addition to optional whitespace, but only at specific locations and at most one. Also there's exactly one place in the grammar where the whitespace is not marked optional.