This bug is almost old enough to drive.<p>I submitted an earlier version of it back in the early 00s and have been CC'd on the endless procedural back-and-forth ever since. Incredibly, nobody ever said "we're just not doing it."<p>One for the book of world records, Oldest Bug category.
This reminds me of "MySQL Bug #20786 gets cake":<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAiVsbXVP6k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAiVsbXVP6k</a>
Ahh the rare self-closing bug. Keep the ticket open long enough, and maybe the standards group will adopt your behavior!<p>It's cool that the large browsers had standardized on the same non-standard behavior. Makes total sense for WHATWG to adopt it, right?
Most places I've worked, the older a bug is, the less likely it will ever be fixed. The reasoning goes "users have lived with it for this long, so it must not be important." And we have regressions in the code that's about to go out that have not faced users yet--fix them first.<p>Has anyone ever successfully argued for going back and fixing ancient bugs, prioritizing it over fixing more recently-discovered bugs? What argument did you use?