Chris Thomas and Wars
I can kinda see where you might be coming from, given that standards could so easily drift towards a design-by-comittee compromise that suits no-one.
However, I do disagree on a number of things, including your comments about simplicity. Don't confuse the simple syntax of HTML and CSS with a lack of expressiveness. I certainly wouldn't say that simplicity implies ease of use or swift learning either... using CSS well is not a trivial skill. Nor does a complex syntax imply a more powerful, more useful, or more expressive language.
The other points you make are interesting and valid, but I do not feel that a unilateral decision to implement exciting new things by any developer of a commodity such as a web browser is a good thing for anyone. If every browser is different, suddenly I must choose between doing an order of magnitude more work or alienating a potentially significant) proportion of my client's customers. If the browsers without the shiny new features fall by the wayside, and so I have but one platform to develop for, what is to stop that platform from stagnating?
Hint: all these things have already happened, and absolutely no-one thought they were good developments (beyond perhaps Microsoft shareholders).
Your comments about SVG and Javascript, are interesting... but you may notice that firefox already has good support for SVG embedded in HTML and manipulated by javascript. Why does no-one use it? Because hardly anyone is keen on developing for a single browser. Who is going to make a cross-browser, cross platform SVG renderer, now Adobe is more interested in Flash? So now we are all stuck with flash which is a great inconvenience from my point of view as a *web developer* as opposed to a *web designer*. But the benefits and disadvantages of flash are a whole holy war unto themselves, which I've no interest in getting in to here.
Finally, I shall follow up your 'the web is not a book. get over it' comment with the observation that when people attempt to impose their own design idioms on to users, they often *reduce* the product's usefulness. PDF documents, flash websites.... they all beautifully convey a designer's vision to an end user, but unlike HTML if that design and vision is lacking the user is powerless to do anything about it. Little things like cut'n'paste, or various accessibility issues spring to mind.
Suffice to say, simplicity and standards are generally good things. The complex and the proprietory are often an irritation.
Anyway, I've already rambled too much and too incoherently.