[plug] Standards

[James Devenish]

In message <1080010998.977.45.camel at syngery>
on Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 11:03:19AM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> If he had of written about how he liked web standards and said that CSS
> was a good thing he would never hear about it.

If someone is a designer of graphical web pages who hasn't already heard
about CSS, nor about Microsoft's software tactics, I would suspect that
person's awareness problem is a little more extensive than any lack of
magazine citations on the PLUG list ;-)

In message <1080010998.977.45.camel at syngery>
on Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 11:03:19AM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> Standards (not just web standards) can also have a negative effect
> when a standard is adopted that is quickly made obsolete by the new
> (constant) rapid developments that happen daily.

Just as a quick note: I think you might be confusing standards with
standardisation, and retrospective documentation with planned designs.
Some people will feel that the "slow pace of standardisation" is an
inhibitor to innovation and competition, and others find that the burden
of "standards" makes compliance overly difficult. For non-software
standards, just think of how many years it take to get ideas off the
ground in the first places -- standardisation might seem slow for
software, but that's the sort of timescale for a lot of non-software
inventions to get to market anyway. In very many products in our lives,
(and this includes software), we're essentially using yesterday's
technology anyway. There are plenty of "new" products that are old
innovations being given a new commercial life due to refinements in the
technology. On the downside, any debates about software standardisation
will probably end up covering the areas of intellectual property and
proprietary interests.

By the way, to use some arbitrary software examples for my own interest:

 - TCP vs. Instant Messaging. (Former being openly standardised and
   unified, the latter not.)
 - Digital audio formats vs. HTML&scripting. (The former being portable
   despite extensive variety and competition in the formats available,
   the latter being an inadequate and messy set of conventions for
   authors and users.)
 - X11 vs. CSS2. (Both unwieldy and outdated, yet the former
   demonstrating success in the "test of time" anyway.)
 - LaTeX vs. TNEF. (The former being widely portable and actively
   expanded despite its age, the latter being uniform yet unstandardised
   and counterproductive in Internet e-mail.)