[telemachos]

I was thinking of HTML 4 specs: clearly a formatting language that many people can use (with a reasonable degree of correctness), but the spec is not light reading. (The specs for HTML are no doubt far more comprehensible than Haskell's, but I would expect the formal specification of any language to be more painful to read than it is to work with the language. In my experience, that's the nature of the formality involved in a spec: in an effort to be maximally precise and detailed, they become less and less readable).