If you want to make money or reach constituents, this isn't actually a viable option for anyone.

When people complain that they can't submit their DMV forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all the standards, go find another browser" and they say "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who do you think they'll blame?

So we can't have a well-functioning system because that would interfere with some people making money. We truly do live in sad times.

That's why I said "reach constituents". Governments, nonprofits, utilities, etc, all ideally need to actually reach everyone, it doesn't matter how.

Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?

Is it really a standard if the dominant vendor just ignores the standard and does what it wants because then it becomes the "actual standard" ?

As a (terrible) example, look at FIPS. The government has the power to mandate a standard that everyone needs to implement. If instead of "supporting specific browser vendors" they "support a specific standard" then all vendors have a target that works with an agreed upon common ground.

> Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?

Plenty of standards are guidelines. The point is the website’s purpose trumps dogmatic adherence to a standard. If the site works against standards but not in the browser, it’s a failure.

But we can still have websites that work against existing browsers while also being strictly conforming to the standard, surely?

Basically, no proprietary features whatsoever. No draft features. No optionally-supported standard features without a fallback that fully covers the same underlying use case.

Given the history of standardisation for promoting interoperability includes numerous success stories and a pattern of resistance fading over time I don't see why we should expect web standards to be any different. The level of functionality needed by a typical government site has worked close to 100% correctly in literally every major browser for literally decades.

Then perhaps we should look at how we ended up in this state of affairs where testing against the standard doesn't actually ensure that your website works in the most popular web browsers out there, and do something about it? Like, say, mandatory standard conformance testing for browsers with >X% market share?