I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy.
You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.
At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.
At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.
https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts
They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support.
So I'd say if you can't get all four to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.
If you want to try and claim W3C ever had the power to enforce people following their specs, IE6 would like to have a word.
Previously, Gruß and Kuß had no info about how long to pronounce the u – Gruß and Kuss do. And until 2017, capitalizing them into GRUSS and KUSS lost this information, now GRUẞ and KUSS keep it.
Previously, for many words, the rules when to split the word, when to write them together, when to use – was insanity. Now it’s all in a few easy rules.
And you have to remember, this wasn’t the first time German went through such changes – ever since the advent of the printing press, when a written German language was basically "invented" from the many dialects that existed, until today, there have been proponents of a prescriptive language evolution, and they’ve had lots of influence over time.
When you use Tarnen, Verfasser, or Absender, Abstand, Bücherei, Augenblick, Leidenschaft, Entwurf or Briefwechsel, Rechtschreibung or Tagebuch, Grundlage, Altertum, Erdgeschoss, tatsächlich or Hochschule, all these words were defined top-down. (All these words are just from Philipp von Zesen, Christian Wolff, and Joachim Heinrich Campe)
A massive amount of what we consider "German" today was defined and changed top-down, and without these changes, German wouldn’t be recognizable.
Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.
In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthography from scratch. The new rules have never been in use anywhere throughout the German-speaking lands.
They were and are pure fiction.
In linguistics that‘s how you tell a layperson: they think linguistics is proscriptive. Now it seems to be... :-(
And of course people under 22 don‘t care. They have never learned proper German.
> Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.
I just explained why that wasn’t the case. Many linguists in the past have intentionally invented words (see the ones I mentioned) to make the language simpler, and stricter.
And the same continued until today – the drug store chain Rossmann has been a constant supporter of linguistic prescriptivism, has sponsored groups supporting it, and has been using these concepts in all their published material as well. Many other companies engaged in this as well.
The language has never been defined by the people speaking it, but always by the journalists writing it, the linguists describing it, and the companies influencing it.
And German as a whole was created, as pure fiction, by people trying to publish books across the whole of Germany at a time when everyone spoke local dialects.
At no time has German ever been a bottom-up language – and if we already let our language be influenced and shaped by companies, by media – why not at least use similar influence to make it simpler?
Having a language be simple to use is more important than some fake emotional value of being "natural".
I don't care about your opinion that it's "fake" and "emotional".
Language is a core part of my being, and a fascist power-grab killing my mother tongue is simply a crime against humanity. It's no different from how the Turks have been treating the Kurdish language.
I have only weak hope, but still hope, that we can someday reverse this. Violently or non-violently.