And when they are, they take so long to ratify that the industry has moved on. (HTML5 isn't due to be specified until 2014, even though it's been in browsers in some form or other since 2008. And Microsoft will misimplement it anyway, because they always do.)

But all of this is a stupid way to do software. There are smarter ways, and even self-organising smarter ways, with some nominal assured quality. But we're a couple of decades at least from seeing them in general use.

First, people need to get past the geek job hand-coding idea first, get over all the drama associated with project managament, and get past the idea of creating de facto standards for commercial advantage or 'official' standards as an academic exercise.

Another drag on development is Unix/Linux culture's 'Slap it together until it sort-of works, make it public, then go do something else.'

Infrastructure has to be robust, and making software robust is currently too boring for many developers.