> If everyone shares the same underlying implementation, then standards are meaningless: The standards body can say whatever they want, but in practice all that will matter is what actually runs on the single implementation.
How is that different from the case today? The web is moving much faster than the Standards and their inaction has lead to their dwindling importance. The W3C hasn't even ratified HTML5 yet (their hoping to do so in 2014!).
Within the time frame of the W3C discussing HTML5 Google started Chrome and has shipped 24 versions. Not only that, but they aren't waiting around for the W3C to vote and have shipped a ton of emerging tech: WebGL, WebRTC, NaCL, Web Speech, Web Intents, etc etc etc.
How is this bad? We're building stuff now instead of waiting around for a decade.
> WebGL, WebRTC, NaCL, Web Speech, Web Intents, etc etc etc.
The difference is that all these APIs, with the exception of Native Client (which is unlikely to ever take off beyond Chrome), either are standardized already or have standard drafts being worked on. Mozilla does not have go to hunting around in WebKit code to figure out how to implement them.
> have shipped a ton of emerging tech: WebGL, WebRTC, NaCL, Web Speech, Web Intents, etc etc
Except for NaCl, those are standardized technologies, and almost all have multiple implementations (generally at least Chrome and Firefox). It is easy for other browsers to implement them because there is a spec for each, and the multiple implementations of it have hashed out ambiguities and issues in the specs.
If there was just WebKit, that wouldn't be the case.
How is that different from the case today? The web is moving much faster than the Standards and their inaction has lead to their dwindling importance. The W3C hasn't even ratified HTML5 yet (their hoping to do so in 2014!).
Within the time frame of the W3C discussing HTML5 Google started Chrome and has shipped 24 versions. Not only that, but they aren't waiting around for the W3C to vote and have shipped a ton of emerging tech: WebGL, WebRTC, NaCL, Web Speech, Web Intents, etc etc etc.
How is this bad? We're building stuff now instead of waiting around for a decade.