if the code for the de facto implementation is open source, does it matter? i see the code and the standard as the same thing in different languages personally.
I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.
1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.).
or
2. One in which perhaps all the browsers were closed source, but adding new features to any such browser really was just a matter of referencing a script on a web page?
The questions is more or less only useful as a thought experiment by this point of course, and in particular I don't feel that the "standards" process was ever particularly open to begin with, so I don't think things have, or will, necessarily get much worse.
You could say "Well standards document is irrelevant because no one follows them anyway" but that's another issue.