I used to be a member of the HTML5 working group, for a fairly long period of time.

I can tell you that these discussions were very loud, and very public.

There have been plenty of revisions to the HTML5 spec since 2008. There's a lot of history to it, long story short it's not an "official" spec without 2 fully compliant implementations (if memory serves) and they always anticipated that it wouldn't be "official" for *decades*.

HTML is also quite versioned; it's just not moving at a pace that you would expect unless you understand the thinking behind the progress o the "official" spec.

The long and short of it is that presentational stuff like b, i, strong, etc. was getting kept for a while out of momentum, but a *ton* of presentational stuff got removed.

Default CSS styling isn't part of the spec (last I checked, it's been around 10 years since I dropped out of the group), that's just a handshake agreement amongst browser vendors on what the Web should look like "by default".

I (and many others) had very strong disagreements with how the spec was being developed. The editor was a Google employee, and many of his decisions strongly favored Google's approach to browser development. Microsoft with IE took the path of releasing few versions and believing that developers and users were best served by a relatively stable, slow moving system that would be predictable day to day (which makes sense when you look at what it takes for a company to roll out a new browser version or adapt code, development tools, etc. to new stuff). Google preferred to just slam new versions of Chrome onto machines every week or two, and if it breaks stuff, oh well, that forces companies to adapt or die (with a giant workforce to keep their apps and sites up to date, this was the RFC equivalent of "regulatory capture", using regulations to block competition).

Seeing this play out is a large part of why I came to believe that Google is an actively "evil" company.

But I digress. Point is, there's actually a ton of history here... and while I don't expect anyone to be aware of it (it's ancient news to those in a small group of volunteers and never really made headlines outside of that group), the history is there oh how this situation came about.

J.Ja