Once, when I still had the energy, I was reading an Open Geospatial Consortium specification document, and found an inconsistency between a directive stated in the text, and the examples provided to illustrate the directive. This seemed pretty important, since most "Humans" use the examples and ignore the text, so I raised it with the author, who replied to me:
"Examples are not normative"
To me, this seemed to summarize in four words everything there was to dislike about the standards community: dismissive, self-referential ("normative"? really?), and unconcerned with real-world practice. One of the reasons I no longer have the energy.