Yes, standardization processes are different than hardware, but I expected that the requirements for a full and accurate specification would be stronger for an

Yes, standardization processes are different than hardware, but I expected that the requirements for a full and accurate specification would be stronger for an international standard than random hardware documentation-- and, the MS example showed that even a standards document could be gamed to such an extent as to be unusable to create independent implementations. I don't follow the MS world, but I do recall complaints that OOXML as built by MS included binary blobs (straight out of their old, undocumented, doc and xls formats) wrapped in XML. And, folks using MS software at old job sometimes complained that when I edited an MS document in libre office, "I broke it." Thankfully my group standardized on plain text to make version control more useful, so it only came up when dealing with folks outside the group.