The HTML5 canvas was created by Apple alone for use in their “Dashboard” product, and later ported to their Safari browser. Then other browsers decided to adopt it as well, because it supported a number of use cases which the browsers didn’t have another good solution for.
This is pretty much the opposite of “design by committee”.
Yeah, if only the HTML5 canvas was "designed by comittee" (it was not, it was an Apple design) and it was in any way useless (huh? what's the problem with it?)