[cromwellian]

So instead, invent something that's a piece of crap, and make the Web worse than what Android and iOS developers get for offline storage.

SQLite is public domain, there's no need to license it.

Sometimes worse is a better, and insisting on standards process purity in this case I think harmed developers and didn't help the Web at all. There was nothing wrong with SQLite from a licensing standpoint, and everyone could have used it, and reverse engineered a spec later.

[Yoric]

Reverse engineering a spec from an active product which regularly fixes bugs or adds new features? I'm not saying that it couldn't work, but I am not very optimistic.

Plus, I don't remember that anybody in w3c or whatwg actively defended that approach.