Comment by rhdunn

One of the annoying things about having a living standard is that it is difficult to implement a conforming version as additional updates means that you are no longer conforming.

Versioned standards allow you to know that you are compliant to that version of the specification, and track the changes between versions -- i.e. what additional functionality do I need to implement.

With "living standards" you need to track the date/commit you last checked and do a manual diff to work out what has changed.