"Despite having representatives from all of the major browser developers, the Working Group has not been able come up with a solution."
IMO there's no "despite" about that, "Due to" would be more appropriate.
Design by committee sucks even under the best of circumstances. When the committee is made up of very different companies each trying to use the web as a chip to bolster different parts of their businesses, of course the process is going to be broken. It probably can't not be broken.
Actually there are very real ways in which this sort of thing can impact one vs another. eg. Adobe may push for a format that natively supports the double sided color filling rules they use in Flash to make it easier for them to produce Flash->HTML5 conversion frameworks without a lot of code rewriting while other parties may not have this as a concern.
That aside, you picked a ridiculously low-hanging fruit of a concern. Consider something larger, like JavaScript and the fate of ECMAScript 4 due to the very situation I'm talking about. But even the minor bikeshedding concerns can be used as political levers one way or another regardless of how (in)significant one implementation is compared to another.
There ought to be at least some things that literally none of the participants in w3c etc have any conflict of interest about and therefore would be able to decide quickly on. The debate over the <video> tag for example may never be decided on. But I have trouble thinking of any counter-examples.
IMO there's no "despite" about that, "Due to" would be more appropriate.
Design by committee sucks even under the best of circumstances. When the committee is made up of very different companies each trying to use the web as a chip to bolster different parts of their businesses, of course the process is going to be broken. It probably can't not be broken.