Why are content standards hard?

A brainstorm of the problems/distractions that plague typical content standards efforts. -Tantek

• completeness
  • based on platonic ideals of content (as opposed to human behaviors)
  • edge cases
  • scope/feature creep - general purposeness
  • extensibility
• ego
  • reinvention - web and modern search engines have reduced excuses for this, but we will still have NIH behaviors even when ignorance isn't a problem.
  • desire to be the "outside container" (we'll put all other stuff inside us)
• self/community-design bias
  • designed by technologists for technologists (as opposed to for authors)
  • note: it was an *accident* that HTML was easy to learn for non-technical authors, designers, artists etc.: http://tantek.com/log/2003/0813t1158.html#handauthoring
  • localization / internationalization issues (first/last name are different in some countries)
• legal issues, copyrights, patents etc.