Right.
Certainly, as a matter of commercial legal drafting I am familiar with this concept. It was often the case in situations where I would be negotiating and drafting commercial documents that would continue in force for many years, so often it made it much more efficient to incorporate by reference a standard, a rate, or a process by which something is determined, perhaps standards for the production of a type of product.
But we would typically only incorporate by reference those sorts of things where there was a known process for the development of the rate or the standard and there was some kind of public input to the development of that standard that the parties to the agreement could participate in.
Do the regulation-making authorities look at the same kinds of criteria when deciding whether to incorporate something by reference?