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The reality of standards is: there is no standard. My experience is that companies take standards as guidelines and then modify/develop their implementations to their needs.

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Some people would that's what a standard is. The IETF's mantra of rough consensus and running code is one way to describe the processes of creating and using a standard, what you say there is another. A little snide or unkind perhaps, but not really wrong.

I've written eleven RFCs, I've seen how the sausage is made. The sausage is good.

Just to clarify: I wasn’t saying anything positive or negative about that. Just wanted to share my real-world experience. Before I naively thought that standards are very rigid :)

The nice thing about those standards is that you can choose which one you want to use.

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