the standard (which >>10 tried to suggest, but messed up by linking to the wrong one)
the one
>>10 linked to is the current ISO and ANSI standard (ISO 9899:1999 + TC1 + TC2 + TC3).
would you have preferred the latest C1x draft instead?
C hasn't either. A small subset of morons who thought Sepples was an improvement over C decided to force some of their misfeatures into a new standard, and because the C community is on the whole sensible, that new standard has been widely ignored.
ANSI disagrees with you. also, C99 is a huge improvement over C89 (which was itself a huge improvement over sepples), and C1x is going to be even better.
the only misfeature C99 copied from sepples was single-line comments, and if you don't use those, there's not any significant whitespace in the language.