alt Hacker NewsIt's a pity, of all web resources advancements, js, css, runtimes, web engines. HTML was the most stagnant aspect of it, despite the "HTML5" effing hype. My guess is they did not want to empower HTML and threaten SSR's, or solutions. I believe the bigest concern of not making a step is the damned backward compatibility. Some just wont budge to move.
HTML5 hype started strong out of the gate because of the video and audio tags, and canvas slightly after. Those HTML tags were worth the hype.
Flash's reputation was quite low at the time and people were ready to finally move on from plugins being required on the web. (Though the "battle" then shifted to open vs. closed codecs.)