> How about this: I like published formats that become standards as and when they gain multiple implementations.
That is how the standards process generally works these days.
> The web features we use are there because one vendor or another implemented them, experimentally (again I refer you to javascript, or the tag), and they became standards some time after that.
That was a long time ago, when there were few browsers and the Web was much smaller. Nowadays, whenever a browser ships anything, content immediately starts relying on it, and it becomes frozen for all time. None of your other examples have billions of pieces of content; the probability that some content starts relying on the random corner cases of whatever you ship is almost certain. That is one of the most important reasons the standards process exists: to allow multiple vendors a seat at the table in order to create something that makes sense, as opposed to sitting down, writing a pile of code, having content depend on the random bugs and corner cases in your implementation, and forcing all other vendors to reverse engineer your code. (Being open source does not make reverse engineering free, and doesn't even make it that much easier: the HTML5 parsing algorithm was reverse engineered from IE6 without looking at the source code.)
> This is the model that works, and google is trying to continue it. Best of luck to them.
It's also what got us quirks mode, the content sniffing algorithm, the gratuitous complexity of HTML5 parsing, marquee, blink, and the incredibly underdocumented and hideously complex tables specification. I could go on.
You're portraying CSS2 as a failure, but CSS2 is actually a great example of something that is implementable by virtue of being standardized. CSS2 only looks bad because you can go to the standard and look at the complexity, but automatic table layout (what we had before) is much worse, being defined by a pile of C++ code that few people in the world know, with corner cases and weirdnesses a mile long. To this day, table layout is essentially implemented by reverse engineering Gecko. As someone who has implemented both features, I much prefer the former.