I find myself in a tempest in a toaster. Yesterday I (and much of the web standards world) learned about two possible new HTML elements proposed by Google, std-toast and std-switch. I had no idea what “toast” meant in the context of the web, a problem shared my many other people. It turns out it’s a UI pattern, those little notices that pop up and then disappear without user interaction.
But wow, new HTML elements! This is the holy grail. In my part of the web we don’t even dream about new HTML elements. Oh, we’ve tried, but Hixie didn’t much care for footnote, WICG didn’t much care for list titles, and no one much cared about author. Just last week the author of the extensible web manifesto warned me to never expect new HTML elements, due to the difficulty of changing the parser.
But my concern wasn’t so much about the nature of the new elements, but of how we learned about them and what that says about how web standardization works. My [first tweet](https://twitter.com