Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.
As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.
As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.