Moreover, the model in which large, multifaceted standards go through a series of revisions, with vendors following in lockstep, releasing implementations of everything that has been decreed stable and nothing that has not, has never been the way the web worked, despite the fact that many standards organisations design their processes around it.
In practice vendors implement small chunks of emerging ideas, with flags to prevent the ideas reaching the stable versions being a relatively novel addition to the process made possible by rapid release schedules. The ideas become stable, ready or not, when enough people are using them that it's no longer possible to remove or amend the implementation without breaking sites and thereby annoying your user base.
I hear that the TC39 group that controls ECMAScript are planning to adjust to this reality by incrementally standardising features in the future so, perhaps, instead of "ES7" we will see specs for "ES foo", where "foo" is a specific feature. Ironically this is closer to the way that some non-web languages like Python (ignoring the 2/3 divide) work, with a series of enhancements that are adopted as they are ready, even though Python actually does have clear and meaningful versions.
In practice vendors implement small chunks of emerging ideas, with flags to prevent the ideas reaching the stable versions being a relatively novel addition to the process made possible by rapid release schedules. The ideas become stable, ready or not, when enough people are using them that it's no longer possible to remove or amend the implementation without breaking sites and thereby annoying your user base.
I hear that the TC39 group that controls ECMAScript are planning to adjust to this reality by incrementally standardising features in the future so, perhaps, instead of "ES7" we will see specs for "ES foo", where "foo" is a specific feature. Ironically this is closer to the way that some non-web languages like Python (ignoring the 2/3 divide) work, with a series of enhancements that are adopted as they are ready, even though Python actually does have clear and meaningful versions.