if the code for the de facto implementation is open source, does it matter? i see the code and the standard as the same thing in different languages personally.
Of course it matters. The "standard" becomes driven by the peculiarities of a specific implementation, rather than the best thing for the base of customers that are served by the standard.
I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.
They are different things because its unrealistic to fork WebKit and get any significant market share. So even though you might make a worthwhile change to the engine, realistically you need that change to be accepted by WebKit proper for it to matter.
Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.
The response was more in regards to the grand-OP's desire for a lower level extensible runtime and lamentation about plugins, more than a comparison to standards now that I think about it. In other words, which web is more open:
1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.).
or
2. One in which perhaps all the browsers were closed source, but adding new features to any such browser really was just a matter of referencing a script on a web page?
The questions is more or less only useful as a thought experiment by this point of course, and in particular I don't feel that the "standards" process was ever particularly open to begin with, so I don't think things have, or will, necessarily get much worse.
I don't think you can say the code is the standard. An implementation will have many quirks or things not related to the issue we are interesting "standardizing." Where do you draw the line? That would mean no implementation that was not simply 100% the same would conform to the standard.
You could say "Well standards document is irrelevant because no one follows them anyway" but that's another issue.
I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.