@Johann150 @lanodan @arcanicanis I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that it's really difficult to "predesign" a standard before you have a fully working product too.

Even putting aside the politics that always rear their ugly head when it comes to defining standards, I can speak from experience that one thing no standard (that isn't a frankenstein backport of implementations) survives is contact with reality. You're always going to find some obscure edgecase or issue you weren't aware of during standard design.

A lot of the really old web standards have clear roots back when it was only universities (so much smaller and easier to communicate these things), and even there you can find issues with how there were exciting new issues when a general audience got involved. (See: the complete disaster of handling email spam, the failure of domain WHOIS records until literal laws had to step in to fix things.)