I’ve never had access to the SQL standard, but in things like HTML and CSS I know I reach for the specs extremely regularly, and that when working with SQL (mostly PostgreSQL or SQLite, including sometimes having to support both) I get frustrated at the general poor state of SQL documentation (and certainly a lot of this is because of engine diversity and), and have often wished I had access to the SQL Standard (even though I know engine diversity significantly lowers its value for users of particular databases—my ideal would probably be a version of the spec augmented with engine support and links to each engine’s documentation of the matter). Certainly the table of contents for this spec sounds delightful.

Not all specs are particularly accessible (e.g. ECMAScript is often hard to follow if you haven’t spent a fair bit of time around it—it’s mostly natural-language code that works with a ECMAScript virtual machine), but most of the time, I would much rather have the actual spec over someone’s digested summary that covers what they thought was important, but regularly lacks details important for my situation. Some specs are absolutely magnificent. The HTML Standard is my very favourite as both a piece of spec work and as reference material.

Seriously, specs are really good stuff and it makes me sad how people often ignore them because they assume they’ll be inscrutable. (Similar remarks apply to legislative texts. They’re normally pretty easy to understand, and you find all kinds of sometimes fun and sometimes useful gems that potted summaries exclude.)