intertwingly

Tim Bray: We need to crystallize and refine and clarify and write it down so that any literate human can write it and any competent programmmer can implement it and no commercial interests can hijack it. That’s all.

My experience with standards bodies exactly matches Tim's.  We should have a small core of approximately seven required elements.  Ones that we know everybody can support.  Not guess, but know.

Author.  Link and Id.  Two dates.  And content.  We pretty much are already in the ballpark.  Perhaps title and we have a core.

We can still encourage innovation and experimentation - in extensions.  Tim Bray was one of the authors of one such way to do that.

We can even standardize some of these extensions.