Standards hardly matter when to someone just trying to get something done. There's just a lot of weird inconsistenices all over the place. Like this one with word highlighters, and no not restricted to ink enabled devices before you go there:
Well without standards, we wouldn't get things done full stop. As to your example, I created a document in Word 2016, added some text, highlighted the text, saved the document as a MS docx file (as opposed to the strict standard), transferred the file to the Linux host and opened the file under Libre Office 6.0.6.2 and the text displayed perfectly.