> The latest draft of the FLAC specification by the CELLAR working group of the IETF. This more formal specification improves on the format description you can find further down this page. It provides a better explanation of concepts like wasted bits, the implications on subframe bit-depth of using stereo decorrelation, explanantion of the actual symbols used in rice coding, inclusion of various decoding, etc
So it's just likely a long process on a path for formal definition, that was only started relatively recently in the format's history.
See also:
The CELLAR group's charter is like a broad vision rather than a specific internet format scope. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/cellar/about/
The old specification document didn't specify everything, you needed to read the source code or compare with a working implementation. Will people still understand the programming languages current implementations are written in then? We don't know. So this document should be stand-alone, so one could implement a decoder from scratch (without any other reference) in the future.
With this document, archives can more confidently use FLAC to compress audio and thus work more efficiently.
TL;DR: probably not.
There are several such codecs however, with a lossy and a lossless part. Not because it is easier, but for compatibility. DTS HD Master Audio is one of them: it has a backwards compatible DTS core.
