Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place. This is absolutely them shitting in the punch bowl. We made plenty of progress without fragmentation.
No, because whether or not that's how the web is supposed (by whom?) to work, it is not how it did in fact work when Google built that business, in fact, it's farther from how it worked in the period Google was building a giant search business than it is now.
That's just wildly incorrect as a matter of history. To first approximation every technology we use was implemented via Netscape and Microsoft jamming features in as fast as they could and implementing ones from their competitor only once it was clear they were reaching adoption. The interest in a "standards process" really only showed up after the turn of the millenium, once Netscape had faded and IE had begun to stagnate. And in fact Chrome was by far the biggest driver of this change.
Plan Ahea
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At some point whatwg is going to jump the shark. They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner and have to make the choice of "cut off some chunk of the web" or "go forward on a new stack". The all gas no brakes add features like were a start up forget about thoughtful or engineering is a bad way to sustain something.
Sometimes you had standards, but they were often misimplemented because they were bad, the whatwg process is vastly less bad, since it keeps the beta features in beta and no single browser can force them through popularity alone.
