I think it is often important for a standards group to be descriptive rather than merely prescriptive.
Prescriptivism nearly killed the W3C as they were sat around writing specs for xquery or whatever and meanwhile browsers we’re trying to add features while having backwards compatibility with themselves and trying to have compatibility with other browsers. Instead, the W3C should have been trying to codify the sort-of standards of eg quirks mode to persuade browsers to be more compatible with each other.
Prescriptivism nearly killed the W3C as they were sat around writing specs for xquery or whatever and meanwhile browsers we’re trying to add features while having backwards compatibility with themselves and trying to have compatibility with other browsers. Instead, the W3C should have been trying to codify the sort-of standards of eg quirks mode to persuade browsers to be more compatible with each other.