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Or, they highlight that the spec is overly complicated. And a complicated spec is very challenging to implement both correctly and safely.

EDIT: Case in point, all the disagreements and conflicting best practices throughout the threads on this topic.

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I think complex specs are fine. Complex and under defined spec are a nightmare. I had to work on a WebAuthn project recently. That spec is rather complex, but makes perfect sense after you take the time to understand it. More recently, I had to answer a very simple question about X.509. After spending half a day reading the RFC (and about half a dozen other dependant specifications), I gave up and concluded that the question did not have an answer, the best I could come up with was some general graph theory principles relating to DIT.

> I think complex specs are fine. Complex and under defined spec are a nightmare.

Perhaps, but in practice there generally seems to be a correlation between complexity of a specification and holes in the specification (e.g., html, pdf, etc.).

Complexity, whether necessary or not, makes it harder to maintain a spec. But I’d argue that it’s other issues, whether they’re symptoms of complexity or not, that make it hard to implement. Some things have to be complex, but they don’t have to be full of problems.

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