> They don’t work well for product development. I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards.

> They don’t work well for product development. I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards. The IETF standards are carefully crafted, clearly written by someone with experience in developing the thing they are documenting. That's probably because it's IEFT policy to insist on working code before the standard is ratified. The approach seems to be making it possible to to develop an interoperable version with that existing code just from the published standard. Since that's inevitably what you are trying to do it's a joy to work with. The ISO standards on the other hand come across as brain dump made to look organised by the addition of bullet points, numbered lists and a table of contents. They give no explanation on why they made the design decisions behind the standard, so you end up having to re-discover it all yourself. It takes forever. Having to pay for the ISO standards just adds insult to injury. As I was developing something that was a one off (I later open sourced most of it), I could not justify the thousands ISO was demanding. Fortunately if you dig long and hard enough, you can find copies of most of it lying around on the web.