Well, yeah.

Actually, the practical effect of the standards being such a pain is that, despite there not being new blessed versions of the standards documents, there is a lot of change in the de facto standards. This includes things that have always been in the standard, but which nobody previously expected to work. It also includes things that were never specified, but where enough popular browsers did something sensible and the same that people came to rely on that being available. Just because nobody wrote up standards documents of what was expected for a while doesn't mean that the de facto standards didn't keep changing.