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In the 90s you would be right, these days web standards don’t get standardized without having implementations first.

Tell that to WebSQL..

All vendors implemented (essentially) the same API, then the W3C subsequently abandoned it due to lack of independent implementations [0].

0: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

As far as I can tell, only two browser engines ever implemented WebSQL: Safari and Chrome's WebKit (which hadn't yet been forked into Blink), and Opera's Presto (which hadn't yet been abandoned in favor of Chromium). Firefox never implemented it, and neither did IE (Edge hadn't been announced yet), so it certainly wasn't implemented by "all vendors". And both implementations were just thin wrappers around the same library, SQLite, so the W3C was correct in saying there were no actual independent implementations.

>And both implementations were just thin wrappers around the same library, SQLite, so the W3C was correct in saying there were no actual independent implementations.

Why should there be?

Not a great example, since "independent" is the important bit there: browsers just shipped sqlite, and you can't have a spec that says "just ship sqlite".

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