[dinkumthinkum]

I think this is unfair to the parent. Comparing web standards to the OSI model is really not the same thing, in my view,, at all. Web "standards" are much more specific and prescriptive, as well as detailed than the OSI model.

It's hard to say whether the parent is correct about the dark age but such a thing clearly has been the case in the past with regards to standards. There was a time before in the not-so-distant past that browser vendors, particularly MS, did not care much at all about conforming to any sort of standards and created mess for which things like jQuery were partially created to solve. So I think there is real ground the parent's point. The issue is whether it is really getting worse, still.

One thing I think is different from previous years is that the programming community is less accepting, I think, of totally non-standard, even weird, proprietary implementations.