> The most important thing the web standards get right is their insistence on never ever breaking backwards compatibility. HTML, CSS, and JS accumulate a lot of cruft, but they do move forward into the future without leaving anyone behind.

This is the comment you originally responded to. Flash never had anything to do with web standards, which do indeed strive for backwards compatibility, it's why that classic space jam website still works.

The comment was not that the "web" as a whole strives for backwards compatibility. If that were the case we would also be running ActiveX controls and Java web applets.