> Why don’t we just keep the existing name and break the Web?
> In 1996, before CSS became widespread, and long before “HTML5” became a thing, the Space Jam website went live. Today, the website still works the same way it did 22 years ago.
> How did that happen? Did someone maintain that website for all these years, updating it every time browser vendors shipped a new feature?
> As it turns out, “don’t break the Web” is the number one design principle for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any other standard that’s widely used on the Web. If shipping a new browser feature causes existing websites to stop working, that’s bad for everyone:
> - visitors of the affected websites suddenly get a broken user experience;
> - the website owners went from having a perfectly-working website to a non-functional one without them changing anything;
> - browser vendors shipping the new feature lose market share, due to users switching browsers after noticing “it works in browser X”;
> - once the compatibility issue is known, other browser vendors refuse to ship it. The feature specification does not match reality (“nothing but a work of fiction”), which is bad for the standardization process.
> Sure, in retrospect MooTools did the wrong thing — but breaking the web doesn’t punish them, it punishes users. These users do not know what a moo tool is. Alternatively, we can find another solution, and users can continue to use the web. The choice is easy to make."