> Yes, but a committee (or a community if that term has too many bad connotations) can at least argue about the design principles and on occasion decide to change them using a well-defined process (e.g. rough consensus or voting).
The underlying assumption here must be that this somehow leads to better results overall, but where's the evidence for that? "Design by committee" has a negative connotation for a reason.
> The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.
That's because "the market" doesn't want things to break. Like I said, it should've been thrown out, but for obvious reasons it wasn't. The point is, you can't blame "the market" for having created the mess in the first place.
> But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market...
They are a force within that market and it just so happens that so many new people come into the industry because "web stuff" is needed now, but it won't be growing like that forever. These young programmers will grow old and tired (and so will their bosses) and at that point conservatism will settle in, like it has in many other areas as well. It's a market fluctuation.
> The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.
The pace at which new browser features are adopted is actually rather slow, but more importantly, old stuff usually doesn't break. For example, jQuery might be outdated from a developer perspective, but it still powers a lot of stuff.