There is a divide in how the web is used. It is still predominantly used as a publishing platform. These guys should be able to do whatever they want. There's nothing that complicated going on and creativity is a lot more important.

Rich web applications, however, are a different story. Applications that are taking desktop functionality and moving it to the web can benefit a lot from a standardized interface. They are the ones that should be pushed to some published standard. Of course, they need to be convinced that it needs to exist in such numbers to make it seem like a standard. That's a tough battle.

One thought I had was the limiting factor of the browser. The only thing I'm aware of to combat this is Google Gears. I don't have any experience with it, but I do know it aims to basically make the browser more powerful without compromising any of the “security” of allowing local storage access. Maybe in a few years that technology will be farther along and we can finally make the web a dominant, usable, consistent experience for applications.