> I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard.

What matters to me, if I'm communicating with my government (or vice-versa), is that they only use recognised standards.

I will need a web browser, email client, document editor... but not a specific web browser, email client, document editor.

This takes effort from governments, because the vendors of all the products they consume want to try and leverage their government connection to get lock-in and thus make their products mandatory for everyone in the country.

For example, even if government developers only use Chrome browser and neglect to test on Safari, you can end up with millions of Safari or iPhone users unable to perform legally essential tasks, and have no workaround. The same is true for using proprietary office document formats, and that includes Adobe when there's a difference between PDF-as-specified versus PDF-as-implemented-in-Adobe's-proprietary-software.

The importance of standards is that they tell every vendor exactly how to conform and not-conform to the standard. Hence the standard itself has to be made be robust. Hence why a standards committee has to own it, not a proprietary vendor. If it's a proprietary format undergoing standardisation, the standardisation's job is to file off the rough edges and make it interoperable. It doesn't take some fragile code that only works in one way, and say "that's the standard". It throws out the fragile bullshit like Microsoft's broken date handling that they don't even bother to fully document in OOXML.

For comparison, a better standard and standards body (even though they have their own problems e.g. being dominated by Google) would be HTML5 and WHATWG. Everything is carefully specified so that all browser vendors can implement a standard, identically. That even includes things like word-wrapping (a small subset of document layout!), and there are test suites to catch deviations from the standard.