1. I think the most interesting thing about that blog post is that it illustrates how the incentives in standards building get warped. I like to describe this sort of thing as "the effect of economics on programming" - not because there is money involved, but because of the nature of the incentives.
2. Graceful degradation. We've sniffed UA's from the minute they were invented. Any change whatsoever would create untold problems for untold millions of people. The UA is just an arbitrary string so… who cares? Very few people (you and I are amongst these "very few") have to be concerned with this compared to the people such a change would affect.
It's because of 1 and 2 (my second point is really an instance of the first) that we're stuck with Javascript. No one in their right mind thinks it's a good language, but getting all the different browser vendors to adopt a good bytecode would be nightmarish (and not necessarily in the interest of every browser vendor).
2. Graceful degradation. We've sniffed UA's from the minute they were invented. Any change whatsoever would create untold problems for untold millions of people. The UA is just an arbitrary string so… who cares? Very few people (you and I are amongst these "very few") have to be concerned with this compared to the people such a change would affect.
It's because of 1 and 2 (my second point is really an instance of the first) that we're stuck with Javascript. No one in their right mind thinks it's a good language, but getting all the different browser vendors to adopt a good bytecode would be nightmarish (and not necessarily in the interest of every browser vendor).