Not to mention the legion of consultants, access providers, information providers, digital librarians and editors, and support organizations. Depending on any technology that's not royalty-free severely limits the audience. The technology will be perceived as stable as long as individual sites and users can choose between staying with their old applications and upgrading to participate in the new features. If they are forced to change their operation in response to changes that they did not ask for, they will be upset. Once technology is deployed, it never really goes away.
Mistakes represent a documentation, development, and support burden for a long time.
It is critical to experiment and gain experience before wide deployment. Consumers demand quality software products Internet tools have moved from research projects, to user-supported software, and now to the consumer market. Otherwise, the vast resources available for development of mission critical applications will simply be applied somewhere other than the web. After all, growth of the market depends on confidence in the technology which comes from a blend of the promise of an upgrade path with a proven track record of reliability. Netscape is catching a certain amount of flak for not sumitting a proposal for public review before deploying them.