That's all any communication is, is two or more parties using symbols who's meanings a majority agrees on. It does not require a dictionary.
I refer back to the simple fact that the original commenter felt it reasonable to speak the words, believing that others had the same idea what the words meant as they themselves did, and to the fact that I and others did in fact have that same understanding. That means it is utterly silly to be trying to say that the term has no meaning. Does everyone else have telepathy and only poor you are left out of the club? It's even silly to claim that merely you individually just don't know what the term meant, if you would claim to work in any remotely IT related field.
It basically looks like an attempt to look smart backfiring badly.
The reason the things the term doesn't define don't matter is the same reason as for all other terms or symbols. No term is a complete description of anything. It defines what it defines and does not define anything else.
When you say "XML", you still have not said an infinity of things. XML merely defines more than INI. INI defines a certain structure, and you are free to do whatever you want within that structure, exactly like XML and all other formats & protocols.
If they defined everything, then they wouldn't be general purpose frameworks for packaging data, they would be snapshots of specific particular data. In fact they would not even be snapshots but one specific physical instance taking one specific form as it exist in one place at one time somewhere.
There is no way you don't already know all of this, I absolutely credit you with having this much understanding of how symbols work, which makes your argument disingenuous.
If you didn't and your argument was sincere, then you are embarrassingly illiterate for trying to partake in a conversation in this area. Not a crime to be that ignorant, and if so then I apologize for ridiculing a 6 year old who somehow found their way onto HN, but consider yourself now better informed than you were. That a ratified rfc or iso for INI, or any other term, is not required for a term to be valid communication. All that's required is for speaker and listener to both understand it, and such definitions are merely one of many ways for a term to have meaning and for all involved parties to have that mutual understanding.
Wait, I suppose I have to explain what rfc and iso and ieee all mean in this context. Anyone who did not know what .ini meant surely can not recognize any of those either.