Maybe it never would have taken off because many more people would get frustrated trying to make something show up on the screen and give up. Or get frustrated trying to make tools that produced something that all of the browsers would display no matter what weird things the users did.

Maybe it would be so bad that somebody else would make a new, more permissive standard that took off instead.

Maybe all of that has already happened.

Maybe that line from Battlestar Galactica was right - All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.