An RFC that justs explains a data format is essentially useless to me. Well, the format of a file is an important part, but it's less than half the story behind what's there, because you're missing a lot of semantics (that are not easily described in english).
There are many "campfire story" class RFCs that raise my blood pressure because they take a complex subject and describe its syntax and formatting and layout pretty well, but leave the hairy algorithmic stuff in the domain of hand-wavy and loose English.
For some reason we leave critical infrastructure open to interpretation. We don't have standards that actually help implementers make sure that what they've written is correct, instead we have documents that try to describe correct behavior and maybe provide a little guidance. For some reason it's gauche to ship working code in an RFC [I've been reading standards for 35 years and I used to work for NIST, I think I know the issues with code in an RFC -- they seem easily surmountable].
There are very important RFCs that don't have reference implementations in their (HTTP, I'm looking at you. If you've ever written an HTTP proxy then you know the particular hell I'm talking about, and don't get me started on PKI or -- oh Lord -- CSS).
On thing that caught my eye here was the section on the B-tree in the sqlite file format. I've written these, they are hard to get right. But the section here is an english description of a very complex data structure, and if this appeared in an RFC and you asked ten different developers to reimplement it then you'd wind up with wildy different interpretations of the text, all non-interoperable until the world finally decided to have some kind of "interop fest".
So I'm happy that SQLite already has a publically available b-tree implementation. Because you won't have a "standard" without that code, and QED.
Complex standards need reference implementations. Just calling something an RFC doesn't make it more useful. Also, forcing ivory tower types to write working code is the best anodyne I know against unimplementable and overly complex standards.
I assume that they're referring to the great browser wars, where Web SQL was abandoned in favor of IndexedDB because the former was essentially a call out to use SQLite as it is. Many argued against a single implementation because it didn't have an underlying high level specification that would allow for other implementations.
Why are you assuming I am referring to anything? I simply said I don't completely understand the parent comment and would like some examples. Maybe you intended to respond to another comment?
When you're weighing up what to implement, it certainly helps when there is an agreed upon technical specification.