This whole 'effort' is moot since web practice veers so quickly that we'll be back in the same boat by 2020.
Of course they are objectively "better" (by almost any measure) than the mixed old-and-new-that-conflict crap we have.
Is the "new new" we have bettter than the "old new" we had back then? Who cares? That's an institutional question about standards in general.
I'm focused on a very different problem: how we as an industry react to the standards. Currently, we always pile up extra tech debt and almost never (not never, but very rarely) accept the pain of kicking out the really old.
> This whole 'effort' is moot since web practice veers so quickly
I'm not suggesting it's a one-time fix. It might have to happen once a decade, or once every 20 years.
BUT, I think there's a good amount of evidence to suggest this idea could achieve more positive forward motion than it might've in years' past.
Namely, the fact that all modern desktop browsers are on a drastically more rapid update cycle than we were in back when much of this tech debt was accrued (circa 2005). The quicker browsers auto-upgrade, the less likely we are to have widespread "adoption" of bugginess that sets in and becomes permafrost on our industry.
If we fix mistakes quickly, and often, it continues to spur companies to keep their apps fresh and updated.
Is it a perfect solution? Hell no. But I think it's better than what we've got now, which is to say, "approximately nothing."
The world has too many millions of older devices with older browsers embedded to take this seriously. It will always be cheaper to hire web programmers willing to make shit that works than it will be to discard entire classes of device every few years.