@scott right, sure, but if a group of implementers got together to define a “baseline”, and if an ecosystem-level compatibility report like caniuse.com sprung up, and so on

at some point the “i don’t expect others to support x” becomes “so what can i expect someone to support?”

out of the diverse mess of implementations, it’s not too farfetched of an idea to imagine someone is going to want something more orderly

“modern irc” happened, “modern xmpp” is a thing, thus “modern ap”