The web was meant for static documents and some link magic.
Now allmost every complex programm can run in the browser with web technologies. And in the time between you had lots of powerful organisations with their own agenda, as well as millions of single developers with a agenda and a loud voice. How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?
Besides, it would be very hard, to make a clean spec that satisfies the needs of the whole population. So by now I say, all in all, it works pretty good.
How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?
Serious answer: By respecting and supporting the organisation that had for a long time codified realistic web standards reasonably well. When the Web was younger, you could (and many of us did) learn all you needed to know about things like HTML and CSS by reading the documentation produced by the W3C. In many cases, the official recommendations themselves (the documents that were informally called "web standards") were very readable and short enough for normal developers to go through the whole thing.
My experience with the W3C was very complicated written specs, with sometimes no connection to reality(implementation in the browsers). And they moved too slow.
And no. I don't think you can expect the whole world to wait for some spec commitee.
It wasn't that way in the earlier days. The W3C certainly made some questionable decisions later on that contributed to its slide into irrelevance, but it was Google flagrantly ignoring standardisation, absurdities like "living standards", and the way all of the other major browser developers were asleep at the wheel for years that really sealed the W3C's fate. And now, sadly, a new generation of web developers is about to learn the hard way why browser monopolies are a bad idea. :-(
It absolutely is.
The web was meant for static documents and some link magic.
Now allmost every complex programm can run in the browser with web technologies. And in the time between you had lots of powerful organisations with their own agenda, as well as millions of single developers with a agenda and a loud voice. How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?
Besides, it would be very hard, to make a clean spec that satisfies the needs of the whole population. So by now I say, all in all, it works pretty good.