>On a more serious note, this list highlights how development without standards leads to control information being encoded in various tolerable side-channels.

I don't think it's a lack of standards, it's more of a lack of necessary functionality. If the thing you want to do isn't an addressed feature, you'll do it one way or another creatively. Standards provide rigidity that create this situation to begin with unless the standard is mature enough that it captures all the potential needs, especially in cases like the web where your often locked to some standard that may or may not suit your needs. In other spaces, you usually have enough options that one thing or another is flexible enough you can do what you need to do and go with that choice.

Having worked in research long enough you'd be surprised how often something someone wants to do requires some hacky technology approach because many standards exist around business/consumer interaction and systems built around that, because that's where the money is which drives those standards and feature sets.

Yeah, that's a fair point. But normally standards imply functionality. And if something's useful enough that people are inventing creative ways to achieve it, it would likely be standardized, if there's a process to do so. So, the issue about a standard process remains.

It's not really possible to separate that from functionality.

Your point about the potential rigidity of standards is well taken. However, it’s important to note that a standard, by its nature, doesn’t necessarily have to be rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders progress or creativity. Standards can be designed with adaptability in mind, providing a stable foundation while still allowing for innovation and flexibility. This balanced approach ensures that standards serve as helpful guidelines, not as constraints that stifle growth or possibilities.

Your final point about the practical realities where standards rubber meets the road, so to speak, is also a good one. But there's a distinction between the type of standards you might be referring to, such as in manufacturing or quality assurance, and web. In the former, standards indeed can produce this kind of regulatory capture or bloated compliance industry, and associated restriction on innovation and competition. And on the other hand, the type of standards that we mean when we talk about the web, even though it's the same word, I think they're very distinct in fundamental ways.

Although they share the same terminology, web standards tend to be more about enabling interoperability, innovation, and accessibility, rather than imposing restrictive regulations. However, restrictions do occur and they are sometimes abused, seemingly by big vendors to enhance their value capture by penalizing alternatives in the name of “user safety”. In that sense, web standards can share the “corruption of standards” which I think is invoked by your last point.

I love how tables "went away", and were widely replaced with bootstrap. Which gives you ... tables. in divs. But only 12 columns wide.

I think the value of Bootstrap was consistency across browsers. The grid system was the most important part. With standard Grid, Bootstrap is effectively legacy - you shouldn't really be using it at this point.

> With standard Grid, Bootstrap is effectively legacy - you shouldn't really be using it at this point.

Bootstrap first adopted Flexbox for its grid system Bootstrap 4 (2018), and Bootstrap 5 (2021) added support for Grid. It's conservative about supporting new web standards, but I wouldn't personally think of it as a "legacy" framework.

They weren't <table>s through, meaning they could be easily made responsive.

They absolutely are not tables though.

“Gridlike layout” != “tables”.

Unfortunately today w3c and tc39 (Javascript) are completely dominated by Google who ram through a lot of standards while barely paying lip service to the process.

Unfortunately a lot of players who rely on browser functionality are completely silent in the standards committees (like the TV vendors who all run their apps in a webkit or chromium version), so it's barely a three-way tug-o-war between Google, Apple and Mozilla

And really barely. My impression is Chrome still innovates (though somewhat unilaterally), Mozilla sleeps (no clear path towards view transitions ...) and Apple sometimes contributes small quality of life things.

I’m still bullish on the possibility of Microsoft edge shaking up this dynamic a little, but maybe I’m naïve.

They did start https://open-ui.org which really deserves special recognition.

This is a cool idea! Thanks for the link <3 :)

WHATWG didn't advance the Web for anyone except for-profit interests.

I cut my teeth on HTML 3.2 so I know what byzantine BS was needed for IE and Netscape. Those were choices made by MS and Netscape, however, so even with a bigger W3C presence, there was no guarantee or even hint that MS and Netscape would fall in line with new standards to begin with.

And it was better then than the garbage we have now where if one big company decides they want it, the rest of the Web gets to deal with it.

That's SO much better, man. /s