[lobsterthief]

Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.

As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.

[fennecfoxy]

Standards are very important, especially extensible ones where proposals are adopted when they make sense - this means companies can still innovate but users get the benefit of everything just working.

But browsers/web ecosystem are still a bad example as we had decades of browsers supporting their own particular features/extensions. This has converged slightly pretty much because everything now uses Chrome underneath (bar Safari and Firefox).

But even so...if I write an extension while using Firefox, why can't I install that extension in Chrome? And vice-versa? Even bookmarks are stored in slightly different formats.

It is a massive pain to align technology like this but the benefits are huge. Like boxing developers in with a good library (to stop them from doing arbitrary custom per-project BS) I think all software needs to be boxed into standards with provisions for extension/innovation. Rather than this pick & choose BS because muh lock-in.