I think hardly any C++ programmers look at the actual specification even today. Once in a while someone will reference the draft specification immediately prior

I think hardly any C++ programmers look at the actual specification even today. Once in a while someone will reference the draft specification immediately prior to the actual specification (because the draft is available for free). People mostly look at sites like stack overflow and cppreference.com , via Google. I don't know what the status of that type of documentation was in 2005.