I worked on fibre channel networks at IBM. They were all about high touch customer service, and had great data gathering and would debug issues that ultimately were caused by some other vendor breaking the standard. After proving we were doing the right thing, our answer would always be to tell the customer to turn off the broken feature on their other vendor's device (other vendors would do things like inject fake ACKs for large transfers to reduce latency ("acceleration"), which is kind of a no-no in reliable networks. We lowered latency in a standard compliant way by using multiple concurrent exchanges that we put together at the application level).
We did test with some other vendors, but IIRC only at a fairly basic level, and didn't support any of their non-standard behavior. We just used them to validate our own compliance to standards.
To clarify, I think it would be very bad if the government merely "targeted a standard" and did not test its websites on various browsers. I would consider it irresponsible professional behavior.
I worked on fibre channel networks at IBM. They were all about high touch customer service, and had great data gathering and would debug issues that ultimately were caused by some other vendor breaking the standard. After proving we were doing the right thing, our answer would always be to tell the customer to turn off the broken feature on their other vendor's device (other vendors would do things like inject fake ACKs for large transfers to reduce latency ("acceleration"), which is kind of a no-no in reliable networks. We lowered latency in a standard compliant way by using multiple concurrent exchanges that we put together at the application level).
We did test with some other vendors, but IIRC only at a fairly basic level, and didn't support any of their non-standard behavior. We just used them to validate our own compliance to standards.