They did, sort of[1], it didn't appear to fly.
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2012JulSep/007...
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2012JulSep/007...
There are three issues:
1) Language pluggable?
2) Spec-ed shader languages
3) Mandatory languages
The proposal was:
1) No
2 & 3) GL SL ES
Microsoft proposed:
1) Yes
2) GL SL ES
3) None
The perfectly reasonable compromise would have been:
1) Yes
2 & 3) GL SL ES
#1 is about planning for extensibility. Just look at the hackery with JS where lonely, otherwise ignored, strings are used for things like "use strict" and "use asm". Or where Microsoft added "conditional comments", which quite frankly, was essential to the development of Outlook Web Access, which basically gave us Ajax. Or all the absurd vendor prefixes on CSS tag names. Or one of 100 other little hacks that browser vendors have invented to try to innovate past the standard. Pushing pass the standard, by the way, is the only way forward. We've learned that lesson by now, so we should plan for extensibility.
The reasons are manifold, but here are a few:
- Standardizing non-standardness gives proprietary implementations an unwarranted air of legitimacy and blesses incompatibility.
- Proprietary plugins and extensions are more likely to have untested security vulnerabilities and widen the browser attack surface.
- Proprietary extensions violate the essential web principles of cross-platform compatibility, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, and accessibility.