Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Indeed, singular implementations of supposed standards (or mere descriptions of how something is supposed to work) can really drift away from the documentation to the point that those implementations actively conflict with the documentation (or folklore) of what is supposed to be going on under the cover.

It also doesn't help that in some projects, comments and documentation strings are seen as superfluous fluff, meaning that one has to get into the exact mindset of the developers to first of all discover what they were trying to do, and only then to figure out what they meant to do.

Standards can be fairly awful things that are mostly exercises of formalising various vendor implementations, and I perceive Opera Software to be yet another vendor in this respect, even though the various Web standards involved have been fairly comprehensive and coherent. But they do serve a genuine purpose.