> Deviating from the formal spec because everyone practically agrees how to do things, albeit differently than in the formal spec, is something quite different from making shit up, and actually tends to be even harder than building things to spec, as there tends to be no easy reference to look things up in, but instead you might have to look into the guts of existing implementations and talk to people who have built them to figure out what to do - and you would normally start with an implementation according to spec anyhow, and only add special cases for non-normative conventions lateron.

This is exactly what Anne van Kesteren has been doing with the URL Standard: http://url.spec.whatwg.org/