How Do Committees Fail to Invent?
Source: infrequently.org
Some new participants in standards arrive with the expectation that the de jure nature of a formal standard creates a requirement for implementation, but nothing could be further from fact. This sometimes leads to great frustration; enshrining a design in a ratified standard does not obligate anyone to do anything, and many volumes of pure specifiction have been issued over the decades to little effect.
The voluntary nature of web standards is based on the autonomy of browsers, servers, and web developers to implement whatever they please under own brand.