Before REST/JSON api's were a thing, the big corporations gathered in a closed room and devised and debated the future design of web2.
Then they published their results as formal W3C specs which were known as SOAP/XML.
It was a synthetic spec based on predictions and requirements instead of real world usecases.
And as a result it was so darn complex and dependency heavy that it never saw any real adoption.
I suspect they're doing it again https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/