> My point is that open standards shouldn't be blazing new trails with somewhat unknown security surfaces (etc). Open standards should take what works and say, "This is now the accepted way to do it, we have good evidence that this way works best in practice."

I was going to rebut this with JavaScript and the "canvas" element as examples, but I did some research and that's about right.

Perhaps there's a push for early standardization because non-IE browsers have a lot to gain from being cross compatible?