Luckily pretty much nobody needs the standard documents. It's actually my aim at https://modern-sql.com/ to make the relevant information more accessible — in particular including support-matrices ("Can I Use").
I’ve never had access to the SQL standard, but in things like HTML and CSS I know I reach for the specs extremely regularly, and that when working with SQL (mostly PostgreSQL or SQLite, including sometimes having to support both) I get frustrated at the general poor state of SQL documentation (and certainly a lot of this is because of engine diversity and), and have often wished I had access to the SQL Standard (even though I know engine diversity significantly lowers its value for users of particular databases—my ideal would probably be a version of the spec augmented with engine support and links to each engine’s documentation of the matter). Certainly the table of contents for this spec sounds delightful.
Not all specs are particularly accessible (e.g. ECMAScript is often hard to follow if you haven’t spent a fair bit of time around it—it’s mostly natural-language code that works with a ECMAScript virtual machine), but most of the time, I would much rather have the actual spec over someone’s digested summary that covers what they thought was important, but regularly lacks details important for my situation. Some specs are absolutely magnificent. The HTML Standard is my very favourite as both a piece of spec work and as reference material.
Seriously, specs are really good stuff and it makes me sad how people often ignore them because they assume they’ll be inscrutable. (Similar remarks apply to legislative texts. They’re normally pretty easy to understand, and you find all kinds of sometimes fun and sometimes useful gems that potted summaries exclude.)
I'm studying the SQL standard for years now and compared to other standards that I know (XSLT, a little CSS, decades ago POSIX, C and C++) the SQL standard is really hard to make sense of. You might overestimate the value of having access to it.
agreeing here Markus, for all practical purposes all one needs to know are the features supported by a particular product, not the possible features.
big fan of your site !
Just in case anyone who isn't familiar with Markus's work gets a slightly w3schools vibe when clicking the above link: his book SQL Performance explained[1] is probably the single most useful book a backend developer can read.
As a web developer: your site is clean and crisp, with an almost brutal simplicity which makes it very attractive. Honestly, I like it a lot. It could use one or two very subtle tweaks in the super-fine details, but for a technical information-dissemination site, it’s bloody awesome.
My only issue is with the width. While whitespace between the sides and the centre content is very useful, this isn’t the 1990s anymore with its 1024×768 monitors. You _can_ make the centre column responsive to the overall width of the screen. Doing so can also give you a lot more room to do things, and make it easier to read. Your line-height is already great, and is perfect for text blocks a good half again wider if not twice as wide. Even on my vertical monitors, which are only 1500px wide, that centre column is pretty much claustrophobically narrow.
One piece of good news is that you just need to drop #page-wrapper's width (or adjust to preference) the rest of the CSS all appears to be sensibly responsive.
Not all specs are particularly accessible (e.g. ECMAScript is often hard to follow if you haven’t spent a fair bit of time around it—it’s mostly natural-language code that works with a ECMAScript virtual machine), but most of the time, I would much rather have the actual spec over someone’s digested summary that covers what they thought was important, but regularly lacks details important for my situation. Some specs are absolutely magnificent. The HTML Standard is my very favourite as both a piece of spec work and as reference material.
Seriously, specs are really good stuff and it makes me sad how people often ignore them because they assume they’ll be inscrutable. (Similar remarks apply to legislative texts. They’re normally pretty easy to understand, and you find all kinds of sometimes fun and sometimes useful gems that potted summaries exclude.)