The Fooles Troupe probably meant E9 launch a threat to web development?

The comments about "selective compliance with the standard" in reference to HTML5 rings a little hollow, since HTML5 IS NOT A STANDARD.

A "proposed final version" was "released for comment" somewhat more than two years ago, but nobody's been able to agree on how to decide what comments are significant. The "proposed final version" has been revised at least twice, and reissued, and remains "out for comment," with little prospect of agreement.

The optimists suggest that it may be finally finalized and published as a Standard "in about another couple of years," but they'll likely need to release the estimated date(s) for comment to get sufficient agreement just on a schedule for (maybe) finally releasing it.

As long as the proposed standard remains open for revision, the selective interpretation of what it doesn't say, along with large doses of wishful thinking on the part of people who want it to be something it hasn't quite achieved, makes it more of a communal hallucination than a true technical standard that people can follow with the expectation of getting compatibility between systems designed by many different people using different drugs of choice.

It's not clear whether the CSS3 and CSS5 "standards" suffer from similar vagaries. They also are part of the most recent flaps over browser and server design, but I've found less obviously incriminating information on them (due largely, one supposes, to personal laziness).

Of course, that's just what it looks like to one innocent bystander with no particular access to whatever the people who are more involved have been smoking ... or chewing ... or ... to whatever mystic spirits move them.

John